Featuring 341 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction and Children's & Teen
KIRKUS VOL. LXXXI, NO.
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REVIEWS
FICTION
CHILDREN'S & TEEN
Beyond Magenta
The Man Who Walked Away
by Susan Kuklin With enormous compassion and respect, the photojournalist gives six transgender teens the opportunity to tell their stories. p. 109
By Maud Casey A lyrical novel about a man with a strange pathology p. 8
INDIE Senior Indie Editor Karen Schechner evaluates the year in self-publishing. p. 142
NONFICTION
The Kid
on the cover
Data wizards Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste use science to unmask cultural mysteries in Uncharted. p. 66
Michel
by Ben Bradlee Jr. This biography of Ted Williams is an outstanding addition to the literature of baseball. p. 52
A Christmas Carol: Charles Dickens’ Classic Turns 170 B Y G RE G O RY MC NA M EE
Chairman H E R B E RT S I M O N # President & Publisher M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Operating Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N mkuehn@kirkus.com
The poor will always be with us, but it is not easy being poor. It is less easy still when you have no means—legal, educational or material—to escape poverty, which is the condition of so many children who live in poverty around the world, untold millions of them. Charles Dickens knew this well, writing with thoroughly developed sympathies for the belittled poor in Oliver Twist (1838), the book that established his renown at the age of 25. Dickens expanded on his vision when he read a parliamentary report on child labor in British factories—a subject he knew something about; he was made to labor in a factory when he was just 12, his father having been sent to debtors prison. Appalled, Dickens wrote to a member of the commission that had issued the report and announced his plan to write a factual study on the subject. The book that resulted, after a six-week burst of writing, was not his planned study but the novella A Christmas Carol, published in December 1843. Its view of the lives of the urban poor is horrifying, its politics an anticipation of Karl Marx, Jacob Riis and other reformers, its tone one of seething indignation—and Dickens makes no secret of where his sympathies lie. Consider the moment when the Ghost of Christmas Present throws back into Ebenezer Scrooge’s face his mean-spirited declaration that the poor ought to take themselves off to die in order to decrease the surplus population of crowded London. The Ghost responds bitterly, pointing to the disabled Tiny Tim Cratchit: “Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered what the surplus is, and where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!” It takes time and haunting, but Scrooge—“a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner”—is eventually turned to the good and begins to share his wealth. It is not an easy turn: Scrooge has to be shocked into doing the right thing, for, as recent studies tell us, the rich are well-supplied with things but, as a class, are notably deficient in matters of the soul. A Christmas Carol remains a standard of the season but usually now in the form of film. The movies that have been made of it have denatured Dickens’ book, turning Scrooge into a mere curmudgeon easily transformed. Even one of its best adaptations, Brian Desmond Hurst’s Scrooge (1951), gives its hardhearted namesake a flicker of humanity that Dickens’ text does not really support. A faithful film version would be a welcome, and surely interesting, project. It would necessarily be rated as too scary for children—and for most adults, too. Give Dickens’ little book a read, or a reread, this season, and you may find that a holiday staple takes on new shades of meaning.
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This Issue’s Contributors
Elfrieda Abbe • Maude Adjarian • Mark Athitakis • Joseph Barbato • Adam benShea • Amy Boaz • Lee E. Cart • Dave DeChristopher • Kathleen Devereaux Bobbi Dumas • Daniel Dyer • Lisa Elliott Peter Franck • Amy Goldschlager • April Holder • Robert M. Knight • Christina M. Kratzner • Paul Lamey • Louise Leetch Judith Leitch • Elsbeth Lindner • Georgia Lowe • Don McLeese • Gregory McNamee Chris Messick • Carole Moore • Clayton Moore • Liza Nelson • John Noffsinger Sarah Norris • Mike Oppenheim • Jim Piechota • Christofer D. Pierson • Gary Presley • Nancy Robertson • Lloyd Sachs Leslie Safford • Bob Sanchez • Rosanne Simeone • Linda Simon • Elaine Sioufi • Arthur Smith • Wendy Smith • Margot E. Spangenberg • Matthew Tiffany • Claire Trazenfeld • Pete Warzel • Steve Weinberg Carol White • Chris White
Cover photo by Jessica Scranton
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contents fiction
The Kirkus Star is awarded to books of remarkable merit, as determined by the impartial editors of Kirkus.
Index to Starred Reviews............................................................5 REVIEWS.................................................................................................5 Bruce Wagner moves from dark satire to a “joyful exercise”...........................................................................14 Mystery.............................................................................................. 37 Science Fiction & Fantasy......................................................... 46 Romance........................................................................................... 48
nonfiction Index to Starred Reviews.......................................................... 51 REVIEWS............................................................................................... 51 Big data isn’t all about the NSA............................................ 66
children’s & teen Index to Starred Reviews......................................................... 87 REVIEWS.............................................................................................. 87 Shannon Hale’s artful, commercial bid......................... 104 interactive e-books.................................................................. 129 Continuing series.......................................................................133
indie Index to Starred Reviews.........................................................135
Howard Blum delivers a terrifically engaging and pertinent tale of the New York City bomb squad that foiled German terrorist plots against the United States at the outbreak of World War I. See the starred review on p. 52.
REVIEWS..............................................................................................135 The year in self-publishing.................................................... 142
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on the web effective use in this memoir of his work on movies such as Gladiator and The Perfect Storm. Look for these and more indie book and apps coverage this month on the Web.
w w w. k i r k u s . c o m
Photo courtesy Sylvie Lancrenon
International best-seller The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles is the first of Katherine Pancol’s novels to be translated into English and the first in a trilogy following her protagonist Joséphine’s family. As a knife accidentally slices into her wrist, Joséphine realizes she would be glad to simply slip away from her life. At that moment, Joséphine understands that her husband, Antoine, will never find work. He’ll carry on with his mistress, and she’ll have to put food on the table. As a medieval historian, her financial prospects are slim. Out of the blue, her chic sister, Iris, offers her a Faustian bargain: Write a novel set in her beloved 12th century, but allow Iris to claim authorship. Kirkus writer Nidhi Chaudhry talks with Katherine Pancol this month. As the year comes to a close, Kirkus spotlights the best titles of the year. From the week of Dec. 16th until the end of the year, we’ll be highlighting the best indie titles published this year, as well as the best interactive e-books and book apps of 2013. Kirkus’ Best Books of 2013 are thoughtful selections of the year’s most intriguing books and apps. You’ll find clever apps like Perfect Coffee at Home. Ordinary consumers may have a jones for java, but authors Michael Haft and Harrison Suarez take it to extremes. Having graduated from coffee as a “bitter caffeine-delivery system” to a perfect blend of art and science, they here serve up several strategies for making a perfect cup of brew and, in doing so, prove that what we once knew is all wrong. Chris Cander’s 11 Stories offers up an original and compelling frame story: an 11-floor plunge to the narrator’s demise. Time slows as Roscoe descends from the top of the building he is the superintendent of, remembering a story about someone who lived on each floor as he passes. Rob Harris’ Unexposed Film: A Year on Location is a breezy memoir of a publicist’s year on Hollywood movie locations. Harris enjoyed privileged access to the insular world of Hollywood movie productions, and he puts that experience to
What can we learn from the sodden stories of six gifted but alcoholic writers? Freelance journalist Olivia Laing, who has a history of alcoholism in her own family, provides an enlightening look at the struggles of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman and Raymond Carver—six men (she explains why she included no women) whose careers and lives were shaken and shortened by their addiction to alcohol— in her latest, The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking. Kirkus talks with Laing about her provocative and evocative blend of memoir, literary history and lyrical travel writing. Photo courtesy Jonathan Ring
Check out these highlights from Kirkus’ online coverage at www.kirkus.com 9
9 And be sure to check out our indie publishing series, featuring some of today’s most intriguing self-published authors. Each week, we feature authors’ exclusive personal essays and reported articles on how they achieved their success in publishing. It’s a must-read resource for any aspiring author interested in getting readers to notice their new books.
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fiction LOST LAKE
These titles earned the Kirkus Star:
Allen, Sarah Addison St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-250-01980-6
THE MAN WHO WALKED AWAY by Maud Casey..............................8 LONG MAN by Amy Greene................................................................. 13
Old wrongs are righted for a motley community of Southerners in this latest, semienchanted novel by Allen (The Peach Keeper, 2011, etc.). A year after her husband dies, Kate Pheris wakes up. She was still functioning for that year, still caring for her 8-year-old daughter, Devin, but she was not herself. Shedding her year of slumber, Kate realizes that she has allowed her calculating mother-in-law to take over her and Devin’s lives—not a good thing for two free spirits—so they flee to Lost Lake in rural Georgia, the place Kate had her “last best summer” when she was 12. Lost Lake is owned by Kate’s great-aunt Eby, one of the few women wise enough to escape their family curse: marrying poor men then falling apart completely when the men die young. Eby lived a long, happy life running the modest resort with her husband, George, but George passed away, and now Eby plans to sell the property and move on, much to the chagrin of her few remaining regulars and her best friend and resort cook, Lisette. All gather to celebrate one last summer with Eby, secretly hoping to convince her not to sell. Along the way, we get back stories of the patrons: Bulahdeen, old and plainspoken; Selma, the man-eater looking for her eighth husband; Jack, who is in love with Lisette; and Wes, the boy Kate spent her last best summer with, now grown. Tragic pasts abound—the body count alone is impressive—and each lakegoer is haunted to a different extent. It’s clear from the beginning that healing is on the horizon for everyone. Light, sweet and sparkly. (First printing of 125,000)
THE BLAZING WORLD by Siri Hustvedt...........................................18 THE THOUGHTS AND HAPPENINGS OF WILFRED PRICE PURVEYOR OF SUPERIOR FUNERALS by Wendy Jones...................19 YOU DISAPPEAR by Christian Jungersen; trans. by Misha Hoekstra..................................................................... 20 THIS IS THE GARDEN by Giulio Mozzi; trans. by Elizabeth Harris....................................................................25 THE TRAITOR’S WIFE by Allison Pataki........................................... 28 THE GOOD LUCK OF RIGHT NOW by Matthew Quick.................. 29 STRANGE BODIES by Marcel Theroux.............................................. 35 ONCE UPON A LIE by Maggie Barbieri..............................................38 SHOOT THE WOMAN FIRST by Wallace Stroby............................... 44 A DARKLING SEA by James L. Cambias........................................... 46 THE UNDEAD POOL by Kim Harrison..............................................47 DO OR DIE by Suzanne Brockmann................................................... 48 THE UNDEAD POOL
Harrison, Kim Harper Voyager (512 pp.) $27.99 | $15.99 e-book Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-06-195793-2 978-0-06-230015-7 e-book
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THE VOYAGE
QUEEN SUGAR
Bail, Murray MacLehose Press (144 pp.) $22.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-62365-072-8
Baszile, Natalie Pamela Dorman/Viking (384 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 6, 2014 978-0-670-02613-5
Australian novelist Bail (Eucalyptus, 1998, etc.) offers a slim avant-garde novel with a narrative that cavorts through time and space. Frank Delage invents a new concert grand piano, self-engineered at his Sydney, Australia, factory, a piano of “radical construction” from whose “logic and mechanical efficiency came the distinctive new sound.” Delage travels from Sydney to Vienna, Austria, which he believes is the center of classical music, to demonstrate his invention. Delage’s piano befuddles Vienna’s insular musical society, but he serendipitously befriends Amalia von Schalla, a wealthy arts patron, then her husband, Konrad, a coldly dispassionate but prosperous investor, and finally her 30-something daughter, Elisabeth. Frank is forever misapprehending the women in his life. He feels sexually drawn to elegantly beautiful Amalia, who radiates eroticism but seems indifferent to him. However, Elisabeth, nearer his age, is attracted to Frank, but he's oblivious. Amalia alternately lures Frank and then rejects him while daughter Elisabeth attaches herself to him with what seems puzzling lassitude. In a post-modern, shape-shifting narrative that pushes Bail’s work into a near stream-of-consciousness dream state, Frank’s sojourn plays out in the past tense, a story told after he chooses to sail home on Romance, a German container ship equipped to carry a few passengers. The narrative unfolds and shifts from setting to setting—Sydney, Vienna, aboard ship—and from paragraph to paragraph and even sometimes within a single sentence. Bail uses no chapters, no delineations, offering the tale in third person. Exotic characters appear, disappear, reappear, including an art critic dressed all in black whose home burns down as he lectures; an experimental composer who destroys a Delage piano as it’s being played by a nude woman; and aboard the Romance, a newly divorced Dutchman, a pair of sisters and a quarreling English couple. In a quixotic narrative that zigs and zags and turns back upon itself, an esoteric exploration of passion and love, memory and ambition is revealed in pointillist fashion.
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A debut novel about an AfricanAmerican woman who struggles to salvage the Louisiana sugar cane farm she inherited from her father. Recently widowed, Charlotte “Charley” Bordelon feels compelled to take advantage of an odd inheritance from her father, Ernest. Unbeknownst to his family, Ernest had sold off his valuable California real estate holdings to purchase a failing sugar cane spread in his Louisiana birthplace. Now, Charley has no choice but to farm the land: Her father’s trust prevents a sale. Going into meticulous and occasionally numbing detail, Baszile describes how Charley manages to find seasoned advisers to educate her on the mysteries of growing cane and how, with very little equipment, scant capital and much sweat over one steamy summer, the farm is gradually reclaimed from utter desuetude. But obstacles mount: Two local white corporate sugar moguls sling racial slurs and veiled threats. (As an African-American and a woman, Charley is a minority of one among the county’s sugar cultivators.) A hurricane sets back months of arduous weeding and planting. A white colleague is proving dangerously attractive, until he makes a racially insensitive remark. But Charley’s main hurdles are closer to home. Her grandmother, Miss Honey, with whom she and daughter Micah are living, can be irascible and stubborn; her favorite aunt, antagonized by Miss Honey, stays away, but Charley’s chief nemesis is her older half brother Ralph Angel, also widowed. Resentful about being cut out of Ernest’s will (presumably since he squandered his father’s money on a drug habit), he has shown up, with his son Blue in tow, to pressure Charley to share her marginally profitable legacy. More detail on past traumas, for example, the profound depression that led Charley to neglect her daughter and the drug addiction that resulted in the death of Ralph Angel’s wife, would have deepened readers’ understanding of these characters’ present behavior. Although the pace can be as slow as a humid bayou afternoon, the conflicts eventually ignite, leading to a cathartic close.
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THE CORPSE EXHIBITION And Other Stories of Iraq
there’s no happy ending, but Blasim’s language is powerful, moving and deeply descriptive, thanks to Wright’s translation. Saddam Hussein may be referenced in “The Killers and the Compass,” a story of evil Abu Hadid, a brute who seduces his brother into burying a deaf man alive. Expect no tale here that translates war and tragedy into reportorial-style fiction stories. One of Blasim’s less obscure tales is “The Reality and the Record.” It chronicles the travails of a humble ambulance driver, kidnapped and forced to act in propaganda videos variously as an Afghan jihadist, a Sunni terrorist, a Shiite martyr, a Kurd, an infidel Christian, a Saudi terrorist, a Syrian Baathist intelligence agent and a Revolutionary Guard from Zoroastrian Iran. The most accessible story, and the most powerful fable about war and its consequences, is the last effort, “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes.” A man escapes the abattoir of Baghdad and happily takes up Netherlands residence and then citizenship. He changes his name to Carlos Fuentes and quickly adapts to all that is Dutch, only to be plagued by nightmares. All the stories share a complexity and depth that will appeal to readers of literary fiction, while some focus more plainly on evil’s abyss, much like biblical parables.
Blasim, Hassan Translated by Wright, Jonathan Penguin (208 pp.) $15.00 paper | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-143-12326-2
Blasim debuts with 14 surrealist stories about his beleaguered homeland, Iraq, and its people. Expect nothing but the impressionistic here—magical realism, bloody allegories and macabre parables— elusive tales, each one a different window into modern Iraq’s tragic history. “An Army Newspaper” alludes to stories sent from the IraqIran war front, a conflict costing a million dead, one generating a “flood of stories [that] did not cease” requiring a “special incinerator” to consume. “The Madman of Freedom Square” seems a parable about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, swirling around “two young men...their blond hair and their white complexions.” In each piece,
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“Lyrical in its style and fascinating in its psychology...” from the man who walked away
FORGIVING THE ANGEL Four Stories for Franz Kafka
A collection of fractured-mirror reality stories for fans of Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez or Jorge Luis Borges.
Cantor, Jay Knopf (224 pp.) $24.95 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-385-35034-1
THE DEEPEST SECRET
Buckley, Carla Bantam (448 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-345-53524-5
A quartet of somber fictions on the surprising influence of Franz Kafka’s work and life on those around him. This story collection by Cantor (creative writing/Tufts; Great Neck, 2003, etc.) opens with Kafka on his deathbed in Austria, finishing his story “The Hunger Artist” while starving himself from tuberculosis. Kafka told his friend Max Brod to burn all his writing upon his death, and the first two stories track the varied consequences of his refusal to do so—literary greatness for Kafka but despair over his betrayal and a creeping sense that he was made into a Kafkaesque fiction himself. The whole book thrives on the tension between the liberating honesty of Kafka’s writing and the existential suffering it depicted, most effectively in the novellalength “Lusk and Marianne.” That story tracks the relationship between Kafka’s widow and German Communist Ludwig “Lusk” Lask; after years in prison at the hands of the Gestapo and Soviet Russia, he finally gets to know his daughter, Marianne, whose own demeanor keeps reminding him of Kafka. The closing story, “Milena Jasenska and The World the Camps Made,” takes place in a Nazi concentration camp; Milena was Kafka’s Czech translator and lover, and she takes another woman, Eva, under her wing before dying. Years after the war, Eva is still wrestling with Milena’s command over her psyche. Thinking about Milena only provokes Eva’s suffering, but as Cantor writes, “more pain was at least more”—a Kafkaesque sentiment if there ever was one. The tone of these stories is inevitably dour, but Cantor’s prose is never ponderous; in Brod, Lusk and Eva, he uncovers three different varieties of emotional pain, depicting each with intelligence and depth. Shot through with black comedy, unsparing honesty and robust intellect—in short, a fitting Kafka tribute.
Yes, everybody has secrets in Buckley’s third novel (Invisible, 2012, etc.), about an Ohio woman who will go to any lengths to protect her impaired son, but some secrets are uglier than others. Fourteen-year-old Tyler suffers from xeroderma pigmentosum, a genetic condition that means he must avoid any exposure to the sun or any UV light. He stays in his room all day, but he likes to sneak out at night and photograph his neighbors through their windows, capturing their secrets. Tyler’s ferociously protective mother, Eve, has devoted her life to caring for Tyler, whose chances for surviving into adulthood are slim. Absorbed in her concern for Tyler, Eve pays little attention to Tyler’s 15-year-old sister, Melissa, who is going through an adolescent rough spot. Nor does Eve have any patience or empathy for her husband, David, who commutes from their Ohio neighborhood to his job in Washington, D.C., to support them all, given Tyler’s extra expenses. One rainy August evening, Eve rushes to the airport to pick up David (who is having his own professional and personal crises). Her attention wavers while texting, and she hits something: Amy, the 11-year-old daughter of Eve’s best friend, Charlotte. After a moment of horror when she realizes Amy is dead, Eve resolves not to own up and take responsibility. After all, who would care for Tyler if she went to prison? Once Amy is declared missing, then dead, suspicion falls everywhere but on Eve, who struggles intermittently with her guilt even while she offers emotional support to Charlotte. The dialogue between the two—and between Eve and David when they’re not at each other’s throats—is often blandly chirpy. As for Eve’s neighbors’ secrets, they are pretty low-grade as secrets go. Despite its high concept, the plot never rises to a temperature above lukewarm. (Auther events in Cleveland and Raleigh)
THE MAN WHO WALKED AWAY
Casey, Maud Bloomsbury (256 pp.) $25.00 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-62040-311-2 Casey (Genealogy, 2006, etc.) fictionalizes a story based on the real-life figure of Albert Dadas, a man from the late 19th century whose strange pathology dictated to him that he walk continually, though he temporarily ends up in an asylum—and eventually walks away from that as well. Although Dadas is at the center of the narrative, we’re also introduced to the Doctor (unnamed but always capitalized)
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who works at the asylum and who develops his own obsession with Dadas. Along the way, we meet some of the other patients being treated, including the veteran, suffering from a type of PTSD, and Elizabeth, who believes that even the most mundane phenomenon is a “divine miracle.” But the most enigmatic figure of all is Dadas himself, who’s led to the asylum by a lamplighter. Dadas has been all over Europe, though his memories of these travels are both fleeting and fragmented. The Doctor tries to help him recover his memories with various strategies, the main one being empathetic listening. The key questions the Doctor wishes to ask are “Why do you walk? Why can’t you stop?” but the answers to these questions are only hinted at rather than directly confronted. While Dadas vaguely recalls having deserted the army with his friend Baptiste and also alludes to a difficult and problematic relationship with his father, his story ultimately remains cryptic and inexplicable. Lyrical in its style and fascinating in its psychology, Casey’s narrative provokes a host of intriguing questions beyond those the Doctor raises, and Casey is wise enough as an author not to provide easy answers.
tensions rise between Protestants and Catholics, Buckingham and Henrietta Maria vie for Charles’ allegiance, and Jeffrey soon finds his own loyalty challenged. Rich in detail and brimming with intriguing characters, Chase’s novel will please fans of historical fiction, although the lack of romance may disappoint some.
THE QUEEN’S DWARF
Chase, Ella March Dunne/St. Martin’s (384 pp.) $26.99 | Jan. 21, 2014 978-1-250-00629-5
Once, Jeffrey played the Fairy King in the marketplace, playacting to earn money for his starving family. But now, his father has sold him to the Duke of Buckingham, and Jeffrey will soon find that the 17th-century Stuart Court is much trickier. Chase’s (Three Maids for a Crown, 2011, etc.) latest historical novel follows the fate of Jeffrey Hudson, a dwarf manipulated by Buckingham into spying on Queen Henrietta Maria. A French Catholic, the queen poses a threat to Buckingham’s influence over Protestant King Charles I. Of course, the court is percolating with secret motives and barely concealed ambitions. Buckingham’s own political machinations include an affair with the beautiful Countess of Carlisle. Before Jeffrey can begin his forced career in espionage, however, he must be trained, and Buckingham hands him off to Uriel Ware, a man with an intense hatred of Catholics, for lessons on etiquette, dancing, popular French phrases, horseback riding and the proper protocol for exiting a room. One wrong step—even a broken goblet—could spell Jeffrey’s death. Placed among the queen’s menagerie of freaks, which seethes with as much intrigue as does the noble court, Jeffrey finds both friends and enemies, including Will Evans, the friendly giant; Archie Armstrong, the king’s sly fool; and Dulcinea, the rope dancer whose astonishing beauty sets her apart in the menagerie and dooms her to a life of unrequited love. Jeffrey witnesses a pageantry of splendor and excess, majesty and corruption, love and betrayal. Yet his own affairs remain restricted to the bonds of family and friends. As |
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CELL
her twin daughters—daughters who were stillborn in 1971—lived on, forever babies. Sometimes Myla disappeared for a few days. Yet life with brilliant, adventurous, unpredictable Myla sparkled with excitement. The summer of 1987, however, changed everything. While swimming, Olivia saw her sisters for the first time as teenagers, not babies. Myla ignored the vision, which prompted Olivia to grab her camera in search of photographic evidence. Eventually, she did find her sisters again, only to have them run off. Yet they led Olivia to a new group of friends, including Kandy, the charismatic leader of the Emerald Crowd; Pam, who painted Olivia into the clique’s mural; and beautiful Jake. Delighted to finally belong, Olivia was dangerously untutored in the ways of friendship. The quest to find her sisters soon unearthed dark family secrets, which shredded her relationship with Myla. Only the search for Daniel can heal the still-raw wounds. Gorgeously crafted, Cornwell’s tale shimmers and shimmies with nimble dialogue and poignantly flawed characters. Grafting magical thinking onto gimlet-eyed acceptance, Cornwell’s debut novel enchants.
Cook, Robin Putnam (448 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-399-16630-3 Cook’s latest thriller (Nano, 2012, etc.). The “cell” of the title refers to cellphones, which are being used to deliver the services of a virtual physician. That’s the business enterprise of George Wilson, the radiology resident that the author brings back and installs in a major medical center in Los Angeles. George, engaged to Kasey, awakens one morning to find she has died during the night. Since Kasey was diabetic, her death is linked to her disease, and although George mourns her, he doesn’t question how it happened. At least, until he attends a meeting at the invitation of an old flame who wants to show off a new app called iDoc, which integrates real physicians and medical treatment with technology in a way that helps keep patients out of the emergency rooms and doctors’ offices by offering them immediate, custom-tailored medical consultations over their cellphones. But when people that George knows start dropping dead and all of them are beta testers for iDoc, the fourth-year resident decides to probe deeper into the project. What he finds is the potential for enormous profits and, much scarier, the government’s heavy hand stirring the pot. Soon, George is involved in an attempt to expose a plan to kill off high-risk cases and finds himself unable to trust anyone, setting off a series of catastrophic events that could lead to George’s destruction. Cook, a physician, knows the world of medicine, but this book reads like it’s phoned in: heavy with clichés, lacking plausible plot progression and packed with characters who speak in exclamation points. A disappointing attempt to link medicine and technology.
NOTHING HOLDS BACK THE NIGHT
de Vigan, Delphine Bloomsbury (352 pp.) $17.00 paper | Mar. 25, 2014 978-1-62040-485-0
Prompted by her mother’s suicide, a French author delicately combines memoir, biography and fiction to explore her family’s increasingly dark psychology. The book has sold an estimated half a million copies in France. Initially, after de Vigan (Underground Time, 2011, etc.) discovered the corpse of her mother, Lucile Poirier, she resisted the idea of writing about her but eventually felt she had no choice. Drawing on the testimonies of family members, as well as letters, photos and home movies, she assembled this disturbing account of her sensitive mother’s life growing up in a large, affectionate, but complex family in post–World War II France. Unusually beautiful, Lucile was a successful child model and star, but her fame fed a desperate wish for invisibility and peace, neither of which were often available in a home with eight siblings. An initially sunny family portrait slowly darkens after an accidental drowning, an asphyxiation, then suicides and suggestions of incest. Pregnant at 18, Lucile marries the baby’s father and gives birth to Delphine, then has a second child, but the marriage only lasts eight years. Delphine, growing up aware of her mother’s fragility, must cope when Lucile’s mental health finally collapses. Constantly trying to separate truth from fable and family myth, the author treads carefully, conscious of sensitivities and her own uncertainties, while tracing events to their tragically preordained conclusion. Sympathy and sadness infuse this compelling investigation in which the author herself plays a difficult role.
WHAT I HAD BEFORE I HAD YOU
Cornwell, Sarah Harper/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $24.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-06-223784-2 The magic of madness or the sobriety of sanity—if you had to choose, could you? Twenty years ago, Olivia fled Ocean Vista, fled her psychic mother, fled her betrayed friends. Now recently divorced, she has come home with her teenage daughter, Carrie, and her 9-year-old son, Daniel, in tow. Like Olivia, Daniel struggles with bipolar disorder. Her husband could live with Olivia’s battle but not Daniel’s. But Daniel disappears, and as Olivia searches for him, she must confront the ghosts of her past, which lead her back to the summer when she left her mother. Always a loner, Olivia never fit in. At home, her mother, Myla, charted the ebb and flow of her energies, read fortunes and spun a fantasy world in which 10
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ALICE CLOSE YOUR EYES
fulfillment is a possibility, she may need to revisit her plans and her past. Jack is everything she’s ever wanted, which could be a sign that she has to rethink her life, her desires and her salvation. Debut author Dean pens a haunting, intense novel that is at once psychologically compelling and emotionally unsettling. Taut pacing and skilled storytelling support a breathtaking plot and characters that are heartbreaking and horrifying yet somehow still accessible and sympathetic. With troubling psychological and sexual violence, this book is not for the faint of heart. It’s scorching, disturbing, and tragic but well-crafted and impressively written.
Dean, Averil Harlequin MIRA (400 pp.) $14.95 paper | Dec. 31, 2013 978-0-7783-1586-5
Since aging out of the foster-care system, Alice has been looking for a man who can help her exact revenge on the person she blames for the bleak direction of her life, but finding him will lead them both on a path of obsession, pain and violence. Alice has quietly tracked a man she thinks might be a good candidate to help her seek vengeance for the tragedy that ruined her life. She breaks into his house to find more evidence, but as she’s exploring Jack Calabrese’s house, he catches her in the act. Angry but also intrigued, Jack secures her contact information then pursues her, and the two wind up in a relationship that combines a spectrum of romantic, obsessive and dangerous emotions. Alice’s vengeful intentions are well-met in Jack, but her schemes have always been theoretical, and now that their
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PHOENIX ISLAND
weren’t happy when Jenny goaded Blanche into retrieving her 1-year-old son, P’tit, from the ghastly holding pen for unwanted children where Arthur dumped him while Blanche was ill. And Jenny is killed while Blanche is hiding out in the countryside with her after an ugly scene with Arthur and Ernest that led Blanche to flee their apartment without P’tit. The men blame Jenny for Blanche’s newfound, unwelcome independence, but there are plenty of other people in San Francisco who dislike the defiant, cross-dressing frog-catcher, who presents herself as an untamed free spirit. There’s far more to Jenny’s story, we learn, as Donoghue cuts between Blanche’s hunt for her son in midSeptember and the events of August, when her collision with bicycle-riding Jenny led to their unlikely friendship. By the time the murderer is revealed, we understand why Jenny knows so much about abandoned children, and we’ve seen how Blanche has been changed by her hesitant commitment to motherhood. (Some of the book’s funniest, most touching moments depict her early struggles to care for “this terrible visitor,” her baby.) Donoghue’s vivid rendering of Gilded Age San Francisco is notable for her atmospheric use of popular songs and slang in Blanche’s native French, but the book’s emotional punch comes from its portrait of a woman growing into self-respect as she takes responsibility for the infant life she’s created. More fine work from one of popular fiction’s most talented practitioners. (Author tour to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami and Raleigh)
Dixon, John Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $19.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-4767-3863-5 This action-packed novel (with YA crossover appeal) combines adventure with extreme violence and concerns a young boxer sent to a very special youth boot camp. Carl Freeman has never been able to stand by and watch while someone is bullied, and that’s become a problem for him. An upand-coming boxer who won a national championship, Carl can’t force himself to walk away whenever a kid’s being bullied. As a result, the orphaned son of a police officer and a cancer victim has found himself in and out of the juvenile justice system. Now, at age 16, Carl has been sent to a place off the coast of Mexico called Phoenix Island, where he meets the beautiful Octavia and Ross, a kid who can’t seem to stop himself from telling jokes, even if that leads to severe punishment. And there’s plenty of punishment to go around at Phoenix Island, purportedly a boot camp for troubled kids. Only thing is, every kid on the island turns out to be an orphan, and all of those orphans seem to be expendable, or at least that’s what Carl suspects when he finds a journal kept by a previous inhabitant of Phoenix. Forced marches, food deprivation and nonstop training don’t bother Carl, but he has an issue with the viciousness that one particular drill sergeant evinces. When things come to a head, Carl finds that all of his suspicions about the island prove even worse than he thought in this crisply written and imaginative effort. Dixon’s page-turner will keep readers of all ages enthralled. A fast-paced, exciting novel with the promise of future installments.
BY BLOOD WE LIVE
Duncan, Glen Knopf (256 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 7, 2014 978-0-307-59510-2
Vampires and werewolves are at it again...and for the most part, they still don’t like each other. In this book, Duncan continues the saga of Tallula (the werewolf, also known as Vali) and Remshi (the vampire), one of the stranger love stories of modern times—and of ancient times as well, since their relationship goes back some 17,000 years. Although Tallula knows about “[s]pecies enmity…, Mutually Assured Detestation at the cellular level,” she still has a thing for her vampire lover. The novel opens with Remshi in a relationship with Justine Cavell. He’s bewildered when he shows up one night expecting to be received with open arms, though Justine is even more bewildered to see him because he’s actually been gone for almost two years. Remshi has almost no memory of his time away, though, given his nature, he realizes he’s probably been up to some naughtiness. Meanwhile, a vampire named Olek sends a mysterious diary to Tallula purporting to explain how to get rid of the curse of “turning”—the process of becoming a werewolf. In a flashback to prehistoric times, we learn of the budding relationship and sexual ferocity of Remshi and Vali; meanwhile, back in the contemporary world, Remshi
FROG MUSIC
Donoghue, Emma Little, Brown (416 pp.) $27.00 | $12.99 e-book | $29.00 Lg. Prt. Apr. 1, 2014 978-0-316-32468-7 978-0-316-32466-3 e-book 978-0-316-40458-7 Lg. Prt. In the sweltering fall of 1876, a San Francisco prostitute tracks a killer and searches for her stolen baby. Donoghue returns here to the historical fiction genre in which she first made her international mark (Slammerkin, 2000, etc.), but she’s blended in the suspense craft she acquired writing her contemporary mega-seller Room (2010). Who fired the shotgun blasts that blew away Jenny Bonnet while her friend Blanche bent down to take off her boots? Blanche believes it was her lover Arthur or his sidekick, Ernest, who have been living on her earnings as a high-priced erotic dancer/whore. They 12
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LONG MAN
has become convinced that Tallula is a “reborn” version of Vali. Talulla and her band of werewolves are attacked, and she, along with her daughter, Zoë, is kidnapped, but her son, Lorcan, escapes. Tallula is questioned—Inquisition style—by Cardinal Salvatore di Campanetti, but in an extraordinarily violent scene, she is eventually liberated when a gang of vampires comes to her rescue. Duncan’s style is animated, and he recounts the imperatives of vampire and werewolf brutality and sexual aggressiveness with particular gusto.
Greene, Amy Knopf (272 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-307-59343-6 Crises abound in a small Tennessee town in 1936, just days before a dam is set to flood it. The Tennessee Valley Authority was designed to help modernize the state during the Great Depression, bringing electricity to its rural regions. But the TVA only spells destruction for the Eastern Tennessee town of Yuneetah, and Greene’s excellent second novel (Bloodroot, 2010) focuses on the holdouts there who haven’t yet left or who refuse to leave. Chief among them are husband and wife James and Annie Clyde, who’d been arguing over a move to bustling Michigan but who shift their energies once their 3-year-old daughter, Gracie, goes missing. The lead suspect in her disappearance
MOUNT TERMINUS
Grand, David Farrar, Straus and Giroux (384 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-374-28088-8 A novel that works on many levels— allegorical, historic and mythic. The main character is Joseph Rosenbloom, or just Bloom as he’s known throughout the novel. His family life is largely unhappy (shades of Leo Tolstoy), for his mother has died, and his father, Jacob, takes him across America to the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles. Jacob’s history is itself an interesting one; after years together in an orphanage, he has children with two twin sisters, Rachel and Leah. He’s a clever inventor who has refined a sprocket drive for Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, a foretaste of things to come, as much of the novel focuses on the budding film industry. Bloom and his father, still grieving over Rachel, Bloom’s mother, live a life largely removed from society. Bloom eventually discovers he has a half brother, Leah’s son Simon, who’s different from Bloom in almost every conceivable way. Simon is flamboyant and open, for example, while Bloom remains dark and brooding. Much of the narrative is consumed with Bloom’s attachment to eccentrics in the film business, especially egomaniacal directors and ruminative artistic types. (We’re told that one director, Gottlieb, “couldn’t properly be himself if he wasn’t being a nuisance. To feel relevant, he told Bloom, he needed to be in the company of people who properly loathed him.”) We also learn of Bloom’s gradual sexual awakening and initiation and of Simon’s complicity in Bloom’s appreciation of feminine beauty. A dense, difficult and demanding read—not for every taste.
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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES
Bruce Wagner
The novelist known for his dark satires of Hollywood says writing his two new novellas was a “joyful exercise” By Richard Z. Santos Wagner was able to craft a deft exploration of spirituality in America. “There’s a tremendous beauty and symmetry in the world,” Wagner says. “The Empty Chair became for me a joyful exercise. To write a kind of fugue, an elegy, a cantata—to write something that was a reminder of our frailty and our courage and the extremity of what we encounter and can endure.” This celebration of humanity’s capacity for enduring tragedy and heartbreak is enhanced by the narrative voice. Each novella takes the form of a character telling his or her story to a fictionalized version of Wagner himself. In the preface, the Wagner character explains that he travelled the country for years, collecting narratives to form an “American quilt” of stories about “seekers slouching toward spiritual redemption.” The novellas are meant to be faithful transcripts of the stories Wagner heard—complete with verbal tics, digressions and breaks for the characters to compose themselves. Wagner says the second novella even started off as a monologue he would perform for friends at holiday parties. The whole book, according to Wagner, should be a reminder of “the sheer power of story” to captivate and enlighten. “For me, [storytelling] is my way of connecting to something outside of myself and connecting to all others,” Wagner says. “The only effort I can make is in telling a story. That’s the only thing, at this time in my life, that has given me Silence with a capital S and allows me to feel a kind of freedom.” The Empty Chair is a book with the intimate, natural feel of sitting at someone’s feet, hearing him or her pour out his or her heart. The first novella is narrated by Charley, a gay man who lived in the closet most of his life and is still recovering from his young son’s suicide. Queenie, the second narrator, is an aging wild child who has been dragged around the world by Ku-
Photo courtesy Caitlin Cronenberg
At first glance, The Empty Chair might seem like a departure for Bruce Wagner, an author, director, actor and screenwriter best known for his sprawling novels of a Hollywood so decadent and caustic that the reader hopes they’re satires. Wagner’s previous novel, Dead Stars, clocked in at over 600 pages and is full of Wagner’s hallmarks: graphic sex, stream-ofconsciousness detours, innovative narrative structure, and skewering portrayals of celebrities and celebrity worship. The Empty Chair, on the other hand, is a slim collection of two linked novellas about Buddhism in America, focusing on characters emerging from suffering and moving toward a deeper peace. In departing from what might have been expected of him, 14
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ra—a former lover desperate for both enlightenment and money. The fictional Wagner interviewed Charley and Queenie years apart but decided to publish the two stories together because they’re linked by “a single, religious detail” so cosmically unlikely that it serves to represent the interconnectedness of all human beings. (It’s a detail that isn’t revealed until the final pages of the book.) Despite the importance Wagner places on spiritual pursuits, one of the The Empty Chair’s complexities is that each character’s trauma emerges from a devotion to spirituality. Charley was abused by a Catholic priest as a child, and his wife blamed her devotion to Buddhism for their son’s suicide. Queenie is abandoned by a lover who devotes his life to the service of an American guru in India. To Wagner, this trauma is related to an American obsession with celebrity culture and entertainment. “We commodify everything, and in America, we compete,” Wagner says. “It’s not enough to meditate. Slowly one begins to regard those who don’t meditate as somehow derelict or criminal. We meditate and then hold in contempt those who do not meditate as long as we do, or as consistently as we do.” This competitive drive and thirst for recognition is how Wagner sees The Empty Chair connecting to his Hollywood novels. “The intersection of celebrity and spirituality has a long and rich history in America,” Wagner says. “The themes I write about are fame, wealth, invisibility and spirituality. It’s an irresistible area for me.” While describing the larger themes of all his works, Wagner mentions an Italian artist from the 18th century named Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who is best known for his etchings of “Carceri d’invenzione” or “Imaginary Prisons.” “I’ve taken that title for all of my work. Just like Henry Miller called his work ‘The Rosy Crucifixion,’ the title to all my books is ‘Imaginary Prisons.’ I’m very much drawn to the ways that we feel might be a method out of the cage—[a cage that’s] sometimes golden, sometimes radioactive— that we find ourselves in.” The Empty Chair becomes an uplifting, enlightening journey for the reader in part because Wagner’s belief in the capacity of humanity to endure is so strong. Wagner’s own method out of the “cage” is through spirituality and storytelling—although sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. “For me, there’s God and Dickens,” Wagner says. “There’s something external
that falls upon one as one has finished a Dickens novel. Other people find it in a Rothko painting or Mozart or Bach. Or the simplicity of a warm day where one has not that much to do and sits in solitude on a bench as the sun falls on your face.” For now, Wagner’s still not sure about the next step on his own path. Maps to the Stars, a screenplay he wrote for David Cronenberg to direct, will be released early next year and will explore the decadent world of Hollywood that Wagner knows so well. In general, Wagner realizes that he tends to alternate subjects—switching between Hollywood and nonHollywood material. Ultimately, though, he always returns “to where I live, in a sense, the place that captivates me: Hollywood. Then I do something perhaps unexpected or unanticipated,” like The Empty Chair. While the “single, religious detail” that connects Charley and Queenie is certainly unexpected, it doesn’t come across as contrived or gimmicky. Wagner’s storytelling is infused with such humanity and hope that readers will finish this slim, heartfelt book with the same feeling you might get listening to Bach or sitting on a bench, feeling the sun on your face.
Richard Z. Santos teaches in a small town just outside Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in the Rumpus, the San Antonio Express News, Huffington Post and many others. He’s working on his first novel.
The Empty Chair Wagner, Bruce Blue Rider Press (304 pp.) $26.95 Dec 26, 2013 978-0-399-16588-7
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“...good fun...” from gulf boulevard
A smart and moody historical novel that evokes the best widescreen Southern literature.
is Amos, a one-eyed Yuneetah native who’s spent much of his life as a drifter connected to violent protests against government projects like the TVA. Greene repeatedly likens Amos to a force of nature, like the Long Man River that runs through the dying town, and the novel thoughtfully touches on the question of how much place shapes our personalities. If there is a way to write about this milieu—Southern, prewar, thick with family and history—without evoking William Faulkner, Greene hasn’t pursued it. But her long paragraphs, sinuous and tonally mythic, aren’t slavish Faulkner imitations either, and Gracie’s disappearance, alongside Amos’ cat-and-mouse game with authorities, gives the novel a welcome propulsion. (The fates of both characters, once revealed, are harrowing, riveting reading.) Two older sisters in town provide windows into the folkways about to be submerged, while a local police officer and TVA functionary represent the transformations to come, but Greene’s imagination is too fecund to make these characters mere symbols. Her novel fully inhabits the contradictions within each character and the ironies inherent in destroying a place in the name of progress.
GULF BOULEVARD
Hart, Dennis Permanent Press (318 pp.) $29.00 | Feb. 21, 2014 978-1-57962-353-1 A universal fantasy kicks off Hart’s debut comic caper. Jason Najarian, pencil pusher for a Boston rope company, wins a multimillion dollar lottery. Jason quits the job, buys his divorced parents each a house, disengages from newfound friends and relatives, and plots revenge on his unfaithful ex-wife, who pleads “[t]emporary insanity....My periods were wicked bad back then.” Jason gives her $10,000, moves to a beachfront mansion on a Florida island and tells her to join him in Malibu, Calif. Hart’s Everyman fantasy plays out with a madcap cast, including “The Hammer,” Phyllis Hammerstein, pint-sized realtor. She’s cool until Jason lays down a $1.2 million certified check, and then she turns flirty. The bad-guy lead is amply filled by 380-pound, 5-foot-10 Salvatore “Two Scales” Scalise, a hit man in hiding after accidentally adding the mob capo’s son to a contract. The romantic lead goes to Fiona “Running Bush” Tallahassee, Native American activist, who Jason believes is “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, without first logging onto a website.” There’s woe to come, but the narrative’s first half is all vicarious fun—new boat, new pickup and enough other goodies to make a comfort-rich hermit life for Jason. Hart has a way with one-liners and lefthanded descriptions, as when measuring Jason’s ex-wife’s intelligence; she “thought AT&T was a place to get drinks because they always advertised about having the most bars.” Add minor characters, like marina manager Memphis the Lighthouse, who believes Jason’s a terrorist, Tranquility, Jason’s father’s new hippie wife, and Bradley, the supercilious professor married to Jason’s mother, to this Florida milieu, and the action moves along quickly, albeit padded by a not-all-that-funny plot thread involving North Korea and human excrement as fertilizer. Works by Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen offer more hyperbole and surrealism, respectively. Still, there’s plenty of good fun here, with a sequel to come.
Preston Nesbitt, a - y r- o l d savant, confined to a mental ward, e x p o s e s s o c i e t y ’s foibles in his journal - a humorous satire on st-century America.
*Foreword Clarion Reviews 16
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“...an introspective, poetic story...” from the guest cat
THE DEATH TRADE
less and less. The terms of their lease preclude children and pets, so the couple works in semi-isolation from their home, a section of which abuts a tall wooden fence with a knothole separating the grounds from a narrow alley. The optical illusions created by the reflections of passersby walking through the narrow lane create fleeting patterns of life that vanish into thin air, and the couple dubs the path “Lightning Alley.” One day, a small cat appears in the couple’s garden, and the man discovers that the young child of a neighboring family has adopted the tiny creature and named it Chibi. Though the cat doesn’t belong to them, the couple develops a proprietary feeling for the cat as their lives become more centered around its visits. They begin to take joy in small pleasures as the cat, always on its own terms, slips between their neighbors’ home and theirs and even explore options to remain in Chibi’s life when they’re told they must find a new place to live. A multifaceted tale that explores love and the fragility of life; the author creates an introspective, poetic story that’s deeply moving. Cat lovers may be especially moved.
Higgins, Jack Putnam (336 pp.) $26.95 | Dec. 31, 2013 978-0-399-16589-4
An elite British special operative unit must prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capabilities and battle an ever growing contingent of al-Qaida terrorists. In this thriller from Higgins (The Devil is Waiting, 2012, etc.), the reader is introduced to multinational terrorists who retain an unrelenting allegiance to the agenda of Osama bin Laden. In this installment, an Iranian scientist who possesses the intellectual capabilities to enable Iran to gain a nuclear weapon must be freed from the fetters placed on him by his country so that he can use his incredible body of scientific knowledge in the pursuit of goodness. Serial characters who reappear to play central roles in this novel include the former IRA assassin–turned–loyal British manat-arms Sean Dillion; the leader of the prime minister’s “private army,” Gen. Charles Ferguson; and Sara Gideon, a heroine from the war in Afghanistan who utilizes her ruthless killing ability and the immense wealth of her banking family to fight for justice wherever and whenever she must. A somewhat unbelievable plot develops when high-ranking Iranian officials are, in fact, working for al-Qaida and continually attempt to kill Dillion and Gideon. To make matters even more complicated, or fantastic, a half Iranian/half Irish hero of the Iran-Iraq War, Col. Declan Rashid, appeals to his “Irish side” and begins to work against his family and his country while developing romantic feelings for Gideon. In a number of instances, Higgins will introduce characters and scenarios that echo the British adventure stories of the lateVictorian period. However, a lack of character development and minimal scene setting make this reverberation of an earlier, and idealized, writing tradition a fleeting experience. Brief thrills but continuous action.
THE GUEST CAT
Hiraide, Takashi Translated by Selland, Eric New Directions (144 pp.) $14.95 paper | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-8112-2150-4 A winner of Japan’s Kiyama Shohei Literary Award captures life’s ephemeral nature in a tender narrative about a Tokyo couple’s attachment to a neighbor’s cat. The simplest of relationships often elicit the most complex emotions, as two freelance editors discover in an eloquent tale written by poet and essayist Hiraide and translated by Selland. The husband and wife, who lease a guesthouse on the grounds of an old estate in Tokyo, have lived quietly since quitting their corporate jobs to work as independent contractors, but though they spend more time together in their tiny space, they seem to communicate |
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TONY HOGAN BOUGHT ME AN ICE-CREAM FLOAT BEFORE HE STOLE MY MA
and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art.” Readers of Hustvedt’s essay collections (Living, Thinking, Looking, 2012, etc.) will recognize the writer’s long-standing interest in questions of perception, and her searching intellect is also evident here. But as the story of Harry’s life coheres— assembled from her notebooks, various pieces of journalism, and interviews with her children, the three male artists and other art-world denizens—it’s the emotional content that seizes the reader. After a lifetime of being silenced by the powerful presences of her father and her husband, Harry seethes with rage, made no less consuming by the fact that she genuinely loved Felix; the nuanced depiction of their flawed marriage is one of the novel’s triumphs, fair to both parties and tremendously sad. As in her previous masterpiece, What I Loved (2003), Hustvedt paints a scathing portrait of the art world, obsessed with money and the latest trend, but superb descriptions of Harry’s work— installations expressing her turbulence and neediness—remind us that the beauty and power of art transcend such trivialities. If only art could heal Harry, who learns the risks of entrusting others with your own unfinished business when the third of her male “masks” refuses to play her endgame. She dies less than a year later (no spoiler; we learn this from the opening pages), and the book closes with a moving final vision of her art: “every one of those wild, nutty, sad things…alive with the spirit.” Blazing indeed: not just with Harry’s fury, but with agonizing compassion for all of wounded humanity. (Agent: Binky Urban)
Hudson, Kerry Penguin (272 pp.) $15.00 paper | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-14-312464-1
A coming-of-age debut novel from London-based author Hudson. This (apparently semiautobiographical) novel traces the first 16 years of the life of a Scottish girl, born into picaresque poverty to a single mother, who is trying to find a man (any man) who can help them elevate their circumstances and secure some stability. The problems (in the novel and with it) begin with the protagonist’s birth, because she is apparently the narrator as soon as she leaves the womb. And both her perceptive abilities and language (often foulmouthed) vary widely, as the reader must determine how much faith to put in a narrator who can neither walk nor talk and who may (or may not) realize how dire (or not) her circumstances might be. Yet, it’s a testament to the author’s compelling voice that the reader feels he or she knows and cares about narrator Janie, her mother, Iris, and many of the ne’er-do-wells they encounter on life’s crooked path. Beyond the frequent profanity, the language abounds with working-class colloquialism: “Grandma had cooked mince, tatties and skirlie.” Janie never knows her father, supposedly an American, but his would-be substitutes range from “a known psychopath” involved in the drug trade to a deadbeat who can’t find or keep work. After the birth of a second daughter, Iris suffers from depression and drugs, leaving preschool Janie to holler, “I’m warning yeh, I’m the grown-up here. I’m the ma!” Aside from a family that is loving in its way, Janie ultimately values “those librarians [who] were the only ones who knew how much hope was snagged in those books.’’ (Sounds like a budding author.) And the greatest fear, for the reader at least, is that her fate will simply recycle her mother’s, that, as Iris says, “Aye, we’re peas in a pod alright Janie.” A funny and dark sensibility can’t quite overcome the flaws of this novel, which ends with plenty of unfinished business, suggesting a sequel or a series.
BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2014
Jancar, Drago Dalkey Archive (420 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 7, 2013 978-1-56478-898-6
Illuminating collection of current writing from across the pond, as different from its American counterpart as a Paris croissant is from a New York cronut. To gauge by this collection, universities in most European countries don’t offer a Master of Fine Arts degree. The contributors to this collection hold Ph.D.s in art history, ethnography, literature, philology, philosophy, and often, their publications are divided between fiction and politically engaged essays. The “enfant terrible of Galician literature,” Xurxo Borrazás, for instance, writes “transgressive fiction,” whatever that is, and, lately, “a challenging collection of essays on literature and politics.” The fiction here breaks down somewhat differently, and though the generalization is a loose one, it seems that writers from oppressive zones such as Belarus (“Well, we’re here to express our dissent against the politics of the ruling regime”) are just a wee bit more vocal about social/political matters than those from more forgiving climes—say, Switzerland, from which Christoph Simon turns in a tale reminiscent of fellow Helvetian Friedrich Dürrenmatt in which a presumably
THE BLAZING WORLD
Hustvedt, Siri Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-4767-4723-1
An embittered female artist plays a trick on critics that goes badly awry in Hustvedt’s latest (The Summer Without Men, 2011, etc.). An “Editor’s Introduction” sets up the premise: After the 1995 death of her husband, art dealer Felix Adler, Harriet Burden embarked on a project she called Maskings, in which she engaged three male artists to exhibit her work as their own, to expose the art world’s sexism and to reveal “how unconscious ideas about gender, race, 18
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transgressive bookseller is ordered to be “put in a coffin...hammered shut with an iron nail, and...thrown into the river.” (Her mule, in addition, is to be turned into sausage.) It would stand to reason that the oppressed would be allegorical and the free representational, but no. In all events, the assembled collection offers a pleasing blend of realism, deconstruction and absurdism that sometimes vie for the dominant mood, as if the spirits of Slavoj Žižek and Samuel Beckett and maybe Georges Perec were fighting for first place. Sometimes all three meet, though, as in Belgian Thierry Horguelin’s meta-policier and Liechtensteiner Jens Dittmar’s alternately dark and goofy view of human relations: “[I]nstead of screwing her, he simply shoved her down the stairs.” Unlikely to touch off a wave of imitators on these shores but an interesting sampler.
attend the Nobel ceremony as a married couple. A scary premise. Get a flu shot. Wash your hands regularly.
THE THOUGHTS AND HAPPENINGS OF WILFRED PRICE PURVEYOR OF SUPERIOR FUNERALS
Jones, Wendy Europa Editions (272 pp.) $17.00 paper | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-60945-185-1
A comedy of errors in rural Wales evolves into a dark tale of family secrets in this very accomplished debut. Picture a pretty girl in a yellow dress, presiding over a picnic on a spring day. It’s enough to scramble a fellow’s brains, and so, brains duly scrambled, Wilfred Price proposes to Grace Reece,
THE CULLING
Johnson, Robert Permanent Press (326 pp.) $29.00 | Jan. 24, 2014 978-1-57962-351-7 Johnson’s debut thriller could be more science fact than science fiction. In a Tijuana slum, young doctors Carl Sims and Angela Varella inoculate residents and discuss possible lucrative careers. Varella, “Mama didn’t raise no fool,” wants big bucks from big pharma. Sims is shooting for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's BSL-4 facilities, where he’ll work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. Back at CDC Atlanta, Angela signs up for money. Sims is assigned to accompany former World Health Organization epidemiologist Dr. Jenna Williams to China to secure avian flu samples. Sims is disappointed. He’d rather culture sexy stuff like Ebola. Then, an emergency: A Laotian village is infected with a 60 percent–plus mortality rate flu strain. Back stories, motivation and action converge. Sims and Williams narrowly escape when the infected village is annihilated by a paramilitary attack. Then, Sims goes AWOL to explore an Alaskan mass grave filled with 1918 Spanish flu victims. Apparently, there’s a scheme afoot by rogue scientists to release a virulent flu virus and kill two-thirds of Earth’s population, a megalomaniacal plot to save the planet from becoming a lifeless rock due to climate change and overpopulation. The narrative shifts into hyperdrive when Sims is kidnapped and incarcerated at WHO’s Brazilian BSL-5 facility. Accepting the notion that millions—billions—could die if mutant flu viruses hop aboard globe-traveling airliners, Johnson doesn’t question that climate change and overpopulation are world-killers, but his narrative shines with admiration for scientists, CDC and elsewhere, doing yeoman’s work for an oblivious public. With enough acronyms to deplete three alphabets, Johnson offers some eye-glazing technical detail—“two surface glycoproteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase”—but it’s decipherable in context. Character development is minimal and the romance is counterintuitive, but Sims and Varella |
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“Jungersen writes brilliantly and raises knotty questions of identity...and of moral accountability, no matter who we are and what we’ve experienced.” from you disappear
who accepts in a flash. Moments later, Wilfred is appalled by his folly. The 27-year-old undertaker barely knows the doctor’s daughter, though they have grown up together in the small town of Narberth, Pembrokeshire, where it’s now 1924. Blame it on his inexperience with the ladies; Wilfred is still a virgin. His subsequent retraction falls on deaf ears. On another front, he’s having better luck. Flora lives with her mother in a nearby town; her father has died suddenly, and Wilfred has arranged the funeral. Despite the awkward circumstances, their strong mutual attraction leads to a wordless tryst, tender but not carnal, in a deserted seaside cottage. Meanwhile, Grace is becoming desperate: She’s pregnant. Her suppressed memory of being raped surfaces, but Grace cannot divulge the identity of the rapist to her cold, forbidding parents. After considering suicide, she simply tells her father she’s pregnant, and the doctor, assuming Wilfred’s guilt, bullies the young man into a joyless civil ceremony. If he denies paternity, no one will believe him, his business will fail, and he will be forced to leave town without his widowed gravedigger father, an impossibility, for the two are devoted to each other. Jones has devised her trap skillfully. Though the novel’s first, pre-marriage half dawdles, and the Wilfred/Flora relationship is too gauzy, the second half is exceptionally strong. Wilfred and Grace discover reserves of courage even as their world grows bleak. From the vagaries of desire, through parental love and its absence, to small-town morality, the British author has put together a thematically rich book in a perfectly rendered time and place.
(supreme irony) unawareness that he’s even ill—threaten to tear apart the delicate fabric of his family life. At a support group for families with loved ones who have experienced brain injuries, Mia meets Bernard, a lawyer whose wife was injured in a car accident. Mia needs Bernard both sexually and in his legal capacity, for she wants to hire him to represent Frederik in a lawsuit being brought against him by Laust Saxtorph, the now-bankrupted director of Frederik’s school. When Mia and Bernard begin their affair, Mia starts to experience some of the secretiveness and indiscretion that used to characterize her life with Frederik, and even Bernard has some secrets of his own. Jungersen writes brilliantly and raises knotty questions of identity—who, after all, is the “real” Frederik?—and of moral accountability, no matter who we are and what we’ve experienced.
HOW TO FIGHT ISLAMIST TERROR FROM THE MISSIONARY POSITION
Khair, Tabish Interlink (224 pp.) $15.00 paper | Nov. 12, 2013 978-1-56656-970-5
A combination of immigrant academics in Scandinavia, a Muslim taxi driver, girlfriends, marital discord and homosexuals gives rise to dangerous prejudices in this slender, darkly ironic fable from a noted Indian writer. Khair’s (The Thing About Thugs, 2012, etc.) curious fusion of social observation, romantic philosophy, comedy and morality tale is played out by a cast of assorted nationalities centered on an apartment house in Århus, Denmark, after Ravi, an Indian Hindu, and the unnamed narrator, a Pakistani Muslim, decide impulsively to move in with devout taxi driver Karim Bhai. Ravi and the narrator, colleagues at the local university, are intrigued by their landlord, who hosts Quranic study sessions at the apartment on Fridays, takes mysterious phone calls, is constantly in need of funds and sometimes disappears overnight. But they are more preoccupied with their search for women, which eventually results in a perfect partner for Ravi and a good enough one—“a half [glass] of love”—for the narrator. While notions of terrorism are constantly hinted at, Khair spends more time considering relationships, a strange balance that renders the act of violence that eventually occurs almost incidental. It does, however, give expression to the latent Islamophobia found both in society at large and nearer home, while the truth about Karim Bhai, when it emerges, is more humane than horrific. Witty and incisive but insubstantial.
YOU DISAPPEAR
Jungersen, Christian Translated by Hoekstra, Misha Talese/Doubleday (464 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-385-53725-4
An intelligent, at times even intellectual, novel about philosophical issues of identity and moral responsibility. Mia Halling is at her wits’ end with her husband, Frederik, for he’s recently been showing highly irrational and unpredictable behavior, such as being exceptionally quick to anger and calling her vile names. Frederik is the headmaster at Saxtorph, a prestigious school in Denmark, and seems to have much going for him, including a loving wife and a 16-year-old son. But during a holiday in Majorca, Frederik falls from a wall, and during a brain scan, it’s discovered he has a meningioma exerting pressure on his brain. Perhaps this is to blame for his increasingly erratic behavior? Perhaps, though his behavior has by now started to verge on criminal activity; it turns out he’s been embezzling money from the school and playing commodities markets with sanguine expectations of extraordinarily high rates of return. Jungersen has done impressive research on brain science and makes it clear that the symptoms Frederik experiences—including lack of empathy for others, childish behavior, emotional cruelty, sexual outspokenness and 20
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THE DEVIL I KNOW
of Oprah-contender Wendy Winsberg’s studio audience. Off screen, Reagan deals with her own far-less-tractable psychological challenges. Her parents favor her sisters Geri, an overweight hairdresser, and Mary Mac, mother of eight, vaunting their mundane achievements while ignoring Reagan’s Chicago Marathon time and Good Morning America appearances. After her ambition required her to dump her good-hearted surfer boyfriend, Boyd, the now 30-something Reagan has nothing on her romantic horizon except Sebastian, an equally driven professional who’s just not that into her. When Push is picked up by the networks, suddenly Reagan is faced with a careerending quandary—the time she now has to achieve her mental makeovers is drastically reduced, thanks to her new budgetconscious boss, Kassel. After her attempt to deter a starlet from stalking a hip-hop superstar backfires catastrophically and hilariously, Reagan’s job is on the line. She enters into an unholy alliance with Deva, whose treatment protocols she has hitherto found as abhorrent as Dr. Karen’s drugs. Using charms and amulets, Reagan astral-projects herself into her TV patients’ bodies long enough to mime a cure for the cameras. But her family still
Kilroy, Claire Black Cat/Grove (368 pp.) $16.00 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-8021-2237-7 The recent Irish property bubble fuels this story of an ill-fated developer and the mysterious, diabolical figure who supports him. We meet Tristram St. Lawrence, the narrator of Kilroy’s fourth novel (Tenderwire, 2006), during a crash landing in his native Dublin, an experience that prompts him to think about drinking again and also reunites him with Hickey, a childhood friend. It’s 2006, and Hickey is doing well in the speculative business of residential and hotel developments; rezoning an industrial park for hotel rooms and condos is as easy as paying a “fee” to a minister, and desolate, abandoned farmland can be valuable if you can persuade the same minister to reroute a train line there. Hickey is the stereotypical muscle while Tristram is the brains, with the financial support of a Mr. Deauville (note the name), who is also Tristram’s AA sponsor, in contact solely by phone from an unlisted number. Kilroy means to humanize the absurdity of the global boom (and bust) without dwelling too much on its technicalities, which is to the book’s credit; Tristram’s devilish supporter gives the story a touch of black humor and underscores the way small human foibles can result in multimillion-euro catastrophes. Even so, the book feels constrained, like a black-box play with just a handful of props, partly due to the story’s framing as Tristram’s court testimony 10 years after the fact. Moreover, Kilroy’s tight focus on Tristram, his alcoholism and his efforts to restrain Hickey’s greed (an addiction in its own right) make a potentially big story feel small, while some subplots are underdeveloped, particularly one in which Tristram pursues an affair. Kilroy deftly characterizes the absurdity of a land grab, though within a curiously limited range of characters. (Agent: Claudia Ballard)
TWISTED SISTERS
Lancaster, Jen New American Library (320 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-451-23965-5 A TV psychologist shrinks from facing her own sibling rivalry issues. Reagan Bishop is the token talk therapist on the Chicago-based cable talk show I Need a Push. Along with a team of other mental health professionals, including Deva, a New-Age healer (she of the autocorrect malapropisms from Lancaster’s Here I Go Again, 2013), and Dr. Karen, a psychotropic pill peddler, Reagan is charged with “pushing” guests who have agreed to undergo televised treatment to overcome their compulsions, obsessions and phobias in full view |
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There are too many points in the book that stretch the plot and characters from beyond believable to just plain silly.
seems determined to belittle her. Lancaster’s unerring ear for hipster parlance and passive-aggressive family snark is on full display—but it isn’t until Reagan risks her most daring body swap yet that the novel finds its narrative stride. A meandering midsection—extended digressions on Godfather shtick, anyone?—may discourage some readers from persevering until the truly satisfying closing twist.
SEAL TEAM SIX: HUNT THE FALCON
Mann, Don with Pezzullo, Ralph Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (336 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 3, 2013 978-0-316-24711-5 978-0-316-24714-6 e-book
THE WEDDING BEES
Lynch, Sarah-Kate Morrow/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $14.99 paper | $12.99 e-book Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-06-225260-9 978-0-06-225261-6 e-book
Bang. A shoot’em-up novel contemporaneous with world politics. Thomas Crocker is a red-blooded, patriotic warrior and leader of the fabled SEAL Team Six. His five team members cover the spectrum of American society, and all are tough, battle-hardened and ready for action at a moment’s notice. That notice begins in Bangkok as a young autistic boy is left an orphan when a bomb is attached to his parents’ car by a passing motorcycle rider. The attack is duplicated toward American targets in other foreign cities, and we are off on a global chase for the very bad guys. Mann and Pezzullo (Seal Team Six: Hunt the Scorpion, 2013, etc.) bring it on fast and heavy. They put the reader in the center of the action—the smells, sounds, savagery of war. (Note that author Mann is a former SEAL.) This war against terrorism targets an Iranian government–sanctioned cadre called Unit 5000 that intends to do serious damage on American soil. To stop them, Crocker and his SEALs work with the CIA and move quickly from Afghanistan to Thailand to Venezuela, ending in Ahvaz, Iran, running through the bad guys’ offices. The SEALs are efficient and deadly, scarred physically and mentally from their work. And it is work, plain and simple, for the warriors they are trained to be, leaving their families to fend for themselves within the secrecy each man must maintain. Mann and Pezzullo can write action and place, politics and patriotism, but the novel feels like it is stitched together, a travelogue of violence. The characters are not fully formed but remain snapshots of what we envision a Navy SEAL to be in the flesh. Retribution drives Crocker as much as duty and patriotic zeal, and when the good guys win, they end with a sentimental moment with the autistic orphan the book began with. Like a good SEAL mission, the circle is completed. Action is the purpose here, and Mann and Pezzullo deliver. Those looking for something more could be dissatisfied.
A Southern beekeeper moves to Manhattan and causes quite a buzz in a honey-coated, hard-to-swallow romance. Self-exiled Sugar Wallace flits from one location to the next with her bees, a blue ceramic birdbath and two gardenias in tow, but she only alights long enough to help others heal from their emotional and physical ills. But Sugar doesn’t choose each new place at random: Her queen bee, Elizabeth the Sixth, crawls around on a map and designates the next stop. Sugar’s move to NYC begins with an almost calamitous collision on her new street, but the two men involved, attractive Scotsman Theo Fitzgerald and elderly George Wainwright, are fine. When she reaches out to ensure they’re OK, Sugar’s drawn to Theo like a bee to honey, which disconcerts her. Betty (Sugar’s pet name for Elizabeth the Sixth), too, feels something and finally realizes she has more purpose in life than just being a queen bee and reproducing. Sugar settles into her new apartment building, sets up her beekeeping on the roof, and, searching for a cup of (what else?) sugar, meets her unhappy neighbors: the single-mother owner of a failing balloon shop, an anorexic girl who collects wedding announcements, an older man whose only joy is his flat-screen TV, a woman who complains about everyone, and a shy, plump baker. Sugar spreads her honey-laden products among her fellow tenants, invites them to her place and gently sticks her nose into their beeswax. She also has long soul-searching conversations with George (who becomes the building’s volunteer doorman, thanks to Sugar) and runs into Theo at the local Greenmarket. Although Theo pursues Sugar, every meeting results in some stinging misunderstanding, which sends Sugar fleeing in the opposite direction. When Sugar finally tells George what’s bothering her, Betty and her worker bees swarm into action, and Sugar learns things about her neighbors she never suspected. Southerners might not take too kindly to the bizarre portrait Lynch (Dolci di Love, 2011, etc.) has painted of Sugar and her bees as the story moves beyond stereotypical—unsophisticated Sugar always wears ribbons in her hair, concocts honeyed cure-alls for every ailment and drips with starry-eyed optimism— to farcical—Betty schemes to unite Sugar and Theo by leading the swarm back and forth between Sugar’s rooftop and Theo’s as Sugar gives chase. 22
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“Benedict Arnold isn’t a name that’s popular among patriotic Americans, but Pataki delivers an admirable book focused on the betrayal.” from the castle of whispers
THE CASTLE OF WHISPERS
thought dead after French imprisonment. With Napoleon 2,000 miles away in Russia, Hawkwood’s astonished to learn he’s key in a conspiracy to overthrow the Little Corporal. After all, the empire is merely “one man’s delusion of grandeur...no more solid than a grass house built on sand.” With drunken generals, betrayals and revenge to be sought, McGee drops French eminences into the plot, with a sufficient number of generals, colonels and bureaucrats peopling the narrative’s second half to require a score card. Villains abound—including Vidocq, former convict and first chief of the dreaded Brigade de Sûreté. Most entertainingly, the talented McGee scatters literary nuggets and factoids about places and people—for example, Vidocq, Grant and other characters are drawn from history. McGee is also a knowledgeable tour guide of 1812 Paris. With a supporting cast from Jacobite émigré Jamie McPherson to general’s wife Denise Malet to Lt. Stuart, captaining the cutter Griffin across the stormy Channel only to be captured and tortured, Hawkwood proves a worthy hero for this epic tale. Hawkwood fans will delight. New readers should seek out the full series.
Martinez, Carole Europa Editions (192 pp.) $22.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-60945-182-0
Rather than marry a brute, a 12thcentury damsel opts for the life of an anchoress, walled up in a cell, in this mystical French story infused with fairy tale and feminism. On a cliff overlooking the Loue River, the ruined Castle of Whispers is given voice by its virgin, Esclarmonde, the beautiful daughter of a minor lord but great knight, who in 1187 evades the powerlessness of most of her gender by refusing the hand of a rough nobleman, choosing faith instead and a life bricked up inside a cell attached to a chapel forevermore. Her only access to the world is a barred window outside which visitors and pilgrims begin to gather. However, just prior to her entombment, Esclarmonde was raped, and although able to conceal her pregnancy from attendants and believers, she can’t conceal the resultant baby, a son, Elzéar. Deftly blurring the line between reality and mystery, Martinez (The Threads of the Heart, 2012) keeps the reader guessing about the story’s miraculous events and its characters’ powers, including Elzéar’s—the son who may be capable of delivering powerful visions, allowing his mother to glimpse the terrible suffering of her father’s army, which is heading to the Crusades. This and other tragedies intensify Esclarmonde’s fate, leading to a cataclysmic yet transcendent conclusion. Transient in impact, but a powerfully visualized magical realist fable.
REBELLION
McGee, James Pegasus Crime (356 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 15, 2014 978-1-60598-493-3 McGee (Rapscallion, 2013, etc.) continues the Regency-era adventures of Matthew Hawkwood of the Bow Street Runners, the crown’s special police unit. Wellington’s Peninsula Campaign continues, and there, McGee rips the tale open with a nail-biting chase and narrow escape. Who-why-wherefore is a surprise to be unwrapped later. It’s London next. There are characters familiar—Jago, Hawkwood’s former sergeant, now profiting in the shadows at the edge of the law; phlegmatic James Read, Bow Street chief; and Twigg, Read’s Dickensian clerk. And characters new—like Chen, exiled Chinese monk tutoring Hawkwood in martial arts. At Bow Street, Read tells Hawkwood he’s temporarily assigned to the Home Office, and there, he’ll receive orders to spy in France. Hawkwood endures a colossal Channel storm before being tossed up on a beach and greeted by a French patrol. Another escape. In Paris, he meets Capt. Colquhoun Grant, |
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THAT PART WAS TRUE
THE WINTER PEOPLE
McKinlay, Deborah Grand Central Publishing (240 pp.) $24.00 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4555-7365-3
McMahon, Jennifer Doubleday (384 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-385-53849-7
British novelist McKinlay (The View from Here, 2011) offers a not-quite love affair through letters and emails between a wildly successful American writer and a lonely, well-to-do British woman. Long-divorced Eve Petworth has lived a reclusive if privileged life (driving a Bentley and never holding a job) in the English countryside. Shy and prone to anxiety attacks, she relinquished much of the control over her daughter Izzy’s upbringing to her overpowering mother, Virginia. With the grown-up Izzy now engaged to marry and Virginia recently deceased, Eve potters about her beautiful house gardening and cooking; her only friend is her housekeeper. Eve seems an unlikely fan of popular American author Jackson Cooper’s macho detective novels, but she appreciates the sensual way he writes about food and sends him a letter to say so. Approaching 50 and recently divorced for the second time, Jack is emotionally shaky and having trouble starting his next novel. Attracted to Eve’s straightforwardness and love of food, he responds to her note, and a correspondence begins. The letters and emails, full of culinary conversation and ruminations on the human condition, offer Eve and Jack both a respite as each faces his or her own separate crisis. Jack, who has a Filipino houseboy for his house in the Hamptons and whose best friend is an actor named Dex, seems a British fantasy of American literary hunkiness—readers are repeatedly assured how well-written his bestsellers are. Nevertheless, Jack, who, while corresponding with Eve, has begun a doomed romance with beautiful ice princess Adrienne, is beset by midlife self-doubt. Meanwhile, Eve faces difficult truths about her relationship with Izzy, who has reconnected with her father, Simon, who turns out not to be an evil ex after all. Early on, before their epistolary intimacy deepens, Jack suggests he and Eve meet for a culinary rendezvous in Paris, a romantic fantasy that may or may not come to fruition. While mousy Eve and sensitive Marlborough Man Jack never quite grab the reader’s imagination, McKinlay wisely eschews easy romantic clichés.
A peaceful Vermont village turns creepy in this tale of the dead returning to life. Sara Harrison Shea’s precious daughter, Gertie, dies in 1908 during a harsh and unforgiving winter in which her mother and father, Martin, struggle to keep food on the table. Gertie isn’t the first child Sara has lost, but her death is the one she has the most difficult time accepting. When she refuses to believe that Gertie is gone forever and blames Martin for her loss, Sara sets in motion a tragic and horrifying chain of events that will forever change the lives of everyone around them. Flashing back and forth between Sara’s time period and the present, the author evokes a sense of suffering and hopelessness as she gathers a cast of characters who bring out the worst in one another: the mysterious, otherworldly Auntie who raised Sara and died before Gertie’s birth; the present-day sisters, Ruthie and lemur-eyed, feverish Fawn, who live with their mother, Alice, known in the town as the Egg Lady; and Katherine, newly arrived, a recent widow and artist who is also mourning her lost son. Alice and her late husband were careful to shield their daughters from the outside world, forbidding them access to the Internet, television and other technology, and home-schooling Ruthie. So when Alice vanishes, Ruthie’s search for her causes her to cross paths with people and things she doesn’t understand. McMahon, a masterful storyteller who understands how to build suspense, creates an ocean of tension that self-implodes in the last two-thirds of the book. That’s when her characters make implausible decisions that cause them to behave like teens in low-budget horror films who know there’s a mad killer on the loose, yet when they hear noises in the basement, they go down alone to investigate anyway. Although she writes flawless prose, McMahon’s characters’ improbable choices derail her story.
A FALL OF MARIGOLDS
Meissner, Susan New American Library (400 pp.) $15.00 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-451-41991-0 A scarf ties together the stories of two women as they struggle with personal journeys 100 years apart in Meissner’s historical novel (The Girl in the Glass, 2012, etc.). In 1911, Clara Wood witnesses the traumatic death of the man she loves in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and chooses to bury her grief and guilt while ministering to sick immigrants on Ellis Island. The hospital’s
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remote and insulated from the rest of New York City, and she refuses travel to the mainland, even on her days off. Then an emigrant Welshman wrapped in his deceased wife’s distinctive marigold scarf arrives, and Clara finds herself reaching beyond her normal duties to help the quarantined man. The truths she uncovers about his wife trigger reflections about ethical decisions and compel her to examine her own convictions about life and a person’s capacity to love, as a colleague tries to help her. Gently interwoven into Clara’s tale is the story of widow Taryn Michaels, whose life 100 years later in some ways parallels Clara’s. Taryn works in a tony fabric shop, raises her daughter in the apartment above and does her best to avoid the overwhelming emotions she’s felt since she stood across the street from the World Trade Center and witnessed the destruction as the first tower crumbled. A recently discovered photo from that day is published in a national magazine and now, 10 years after 9/11, Taryn is forced to relive the events and face the guilt she’s harbored because she acceded to a customer’s request and stopped by a hotel to pick up a marigold scarf, an action that delayed Taryn from joining her husband at Windows on the World for a celebration she’d planned. Meissner is a practiced writer whose two main characters cope with universal themes that many people deal with: loss, survivor’s guilt, and permitting oneself to move on and achieve happiness again. Although their stories are unbalanced—Clara’s account dominates the narrative—the author creates two sympathetic, relatable characters that readers will applaud. Touching and inspirational.
if they refused his help,” and his plea is intriguing enough to lure Yanez out of the house he’s scarcely left for years. “Tana,” one of Mozzi’s most cryptic stories, concerns a woman who comes across an angel, complete with wings, and this angel inadvertently (and ironically) helps her overcome her aversion to sexuality. Although Mozzi’s style is crisp and straightforward, the stories themselves are beautifully nuanced and elliptical.
THIS IS THE GARDEN
Mozzi, Giulio Translated by Harris, Elizabeth Open Letter (130 pp.) $13.95 paper | Jan. 21, 2014 978-1-934824-75-7 Eight elegantly translated short stories—cryptic, wry and witty. Mozzi tends to focus on the outré and is masterful at creating individuals in isolation. “Cover Letter,” the first story in the collection, is a love letter of sorts from a professional purse-snatcher to a woman who was a victim of his predations. He lingers over the contents, speculating about her life and loves, and evokes her presence from the artifacts he finds in the purse. By turns apologetic, proud, empathetic and confessional, he quotes to her from two letters he’s found in her purse and speculates about their significance in her life before he sends them back to her. The next story is “The Apprentice,” a long story about an apprentice in a shop who tries to work his way up from messenger boy to skilled laborer, though he’s subject to the vagaries of office politics and nepotism. “Claw” is a story about Yanez, a recluse in a small village who’s visited every day for over 20 years by the only woman who seems to care about his existence. One day, an Englishman, self-described as a “saint,” comes to “save [the villagers’] souls from certain death... |
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THE CRANE WIFE
then remakes the soul. George has dabbled with artistic cuttings, forming images from discarded book pages. When Kumiko sees one, she asks to meld it into her art, abstract figures formed from feathers. The result stuns. Every cutting produced thereafter becomes the target of frenzied collectors. George is bemused. Kumiko, a mystery, cares not at all. George wants to possess her, to know her every secret. George is adrift, an American expat out of sync, divorced yet attached to his former wife, inept, too open, too giving in love, but George holds the story’s center, and raging around him is single-mother Amanda, unsettled after “two and a half decades of false starts.” Other characters—Rachel, Amanda’s tightly wound co-worker; Mehmet, George’s fey shop assistant; Henri, Amanda’s ex-husband—are each “a fellow traveller across that baffling, hostile landscape” of life and love. Mired in neediness, George, knight errant, cannot grasp the truth of love or of Kumiko, ethereal queen, as she appears in reality, and in perception and memory, as lover and savior of George and Amanda in an amorphous denouement. A magical realist meditation on how to love and be possessed by love.
Ness, Patrick Penguin Press (320 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 27, 2014 978-1-59420-547-7
Award-winning YA author Ness (More than This, 2013, etc.) moves to literary fiction with a tale that unfolds after an arrowpierced crane lands in a London garden. George Duncan hears a wild keening and stumbles into his frigid garden to find the injured crane. George pulls the arrow from the crane’s wing. The bird flies away. Thus begins a meditation on love—for George, for his broken daughter, Amanda, and for mysterious Kumiko, who arrives at George’s print shop the next day. There’s symbolism here, with the narrative interspersed with Ness’ reinterpretation of a Japanese folk tale about a woman born of clouds and a raging volcano. That tale becomes an allegory running parallel to the earth-bound story of love that fractures the heart and
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CHANCE
calculating man obsessed with his dirty work. His daughter lives in fear of atomic disaster, his son is autistic, a railroad train in a human body, and Henry fights the horror of himself, pushing away from them all. “He could not be there, in the house. Not with what he carried.” It is a world of “ghosts” that is intimately gripping. Henry disappears at the end of an LSD torture session that has gone wrong. The tough, pragmatic CIA spook is broken, utterly and finally. Sixteen years later, another operative, Richard Ashby, takes on a cover as Dickie Hinkle, put into motion by a new set of controls in Washington. Dickie creeps through a seedy Los Angeles hunting a band of bank robbers who leave pamphlets on government conspiracies in the pockets of their victims. Someone has connected the dots—the leather-bound ledger that Henry maintained on his experiments to the irrational pamphlets to a series of pulp novels based on psychiatric torture—all circling the illicit CIA experiments with Stormy, their pet name for LSD. O’Connor writes with fire, moving the story along briskly. Hannah, Henry’s daughter, becomes the “ghost catcher,” teamed with Dickie to find her lost father. Photography is the parallel passion between father and daughter, and in this dark world, photographs are the only handhold on reality. An invigorating historical thriller that examines the boundaries of man.
Nunn, Kem Scribner (336 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-0-7432-8924-5 Nunn, who forged his fiction-writing career by concentrating on surfers and their sport (Tijuana Straits, 2004, etc.), changes gears in this gritty portrait of a neuropsychologist named Chance. Eldon Chance sees broken people in his job, so it’s almost inevitable that some of those individuals would bleed over into his personal life. Or what’s left of his personal life. Now that his wife, Carla, is divorcing him, and his daughter, Nicole, is growing more and more distant, Chance is starting to feel the loneliness and disengagement of losing his home life. With everything in flux and under pressure from the IRS to pay back taxes in connection with Carla’s business, Chance uncharacteristically jumps into a situation with a woman who is both mesmerizing and dangerous. Jaclyn Blackstone was a referral that Chance should have kept at a professional distance, but instead, the beautiful, fractured woman evolves into something more significant. After Chance becomes enmeshed in her life, his own becomes complicated: Jaclyn suffers from a dual personality disorder that causes her to transform into the sexually obsessed Jackie, but both of Jaclyn’s incarnations are unhappily married to a vicious, abusive police officer who makes it clear to Chance that his involvement with Jaclyn/Jackie will cost him everything he holds dear. But Chance has a bizarre ace up his sleeve in the form of his odd relationship with a man named D, a giant wall of a human being who appears not to be afraid of anyone or anything. Eventually, Nunn’s characters cross paths, and Chance’s decisions cause his life to careen from slightly off balance to out of control. Nunn, a writer with a gift for subtlety and wordplay, spins a story that is both mesmerizing and a bit confusing. Readers will find Nunn’s story well-written for the most part but not always engaging. Lovers of Nunn’s previous novels may discover in Chance a less than creditable antihero.
DEPT. OF SPECULATION
Offill, Jenny Knopf (176 pp.) $22.95 | $11.99 e-book | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-385-35081-5 978-0-385-35102-7 e-book Scenes from a marriage, sometimes lyrical, sometimes philosophically rich, sometimes just puzzling. If Rainer Maria Rilke had written a novel about marriage, it might look something like this: a series of paragraphs, seldom exceeding more than a dozen lines, sometimes without much apparent connection to the text on either side. The story is most European, too; says the narrator, “I spent my afternoons in a city park, pretending to read Horace. At dusk, people streamed out of the Métro and into the street. In Paris, even the subways are required to be beautiful.” Well, oui. The principal character is “the wife,” nameless but not faceless, who enters into a relationship and then marriage with all the brave hope attendant in the enterprise. Offill (Last Things, 1999, etc.) is fond of pointed apothegms (“Life equals structure plus activity”) and reflections in the place of actual action, but as the story progresses, it’s clear that events test that hope—to say nothing of hubby’s refusal at first to pull down a decent salary, so the young family finds itself “running low on money for diapers and beer and potato chips.” Material conditions improve, but that hope gets whittled away further with the years, leading to moments worthy of a postmodern version of Diary of a Mad Housewife: “The wife is reading Civilization and Its Discontents, but she keeps getting lost in the index.” The fragmented story, true though it may be to our splintered, too busy lives, is sometimes
HALF WORLD
O’Connor, Scott Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-1-4767-1659-6 The hunters are the haunted in a thriller from Los Angeles–based author O’Connor (Untouchable, 2011, etc.) that mines the depths of fact and fiction. This is a book of halves—split between 1956 and 1972. Henry Gladwell is very good at what he does: breaking men through involuntary drug experiments for the CIA in San Francisco in 1956. Across the bay in Oakland, he is Henry March, a husband, father and |
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“...an admirable book...” from the traitor's wife
THE ACCIDENT
hard to follow, and at times, the writing is precious, even if we’re always pulled back into gritty reality: “I reach my hand into the murky water, fiddle with the drain. When I pull it back out, my hand is scummed with grease.” There are moments of literary experimentation worthy of Virginia Woolf here, but in the end, this reads more like notes for a novel than a novel itself. (Author tour to Boston and New England, New York, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle)
Pavone, Chris Crown (336 pp.) $26.00 | $10.99 e-book | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-385-34845-4 978-0-385-34846-1 e-book Pavone follows up his best-selling novel, The Expats (2012), with another thriller featuring some of the same characters. The action here involves a manuscript entitled The Accident, which threatens to bring down a media empire owned by Charlie Wolfe, who now aspires to a political career. While in college, Charlie had a night of drunken revelry, and he and his friend Dave, the sober designated driver, had an accident involving the death of a girl, one that implicated Charlie. Preston Wolfe, Charlie’s powerful father and a former deputy director of the CIA, covered up the accident and for 25 years paid Dave off to keep his mouth shut. Although, over the years, Dave earned a cool $1 million from this deal, he began to feel guilty and so wrote the explosive manuscript. Charlie suspects that Dave’s manuscript is in part a conspiracy to create a scandal and bring down the share prices for the Wolfe empire, bankrupting Wolfe and also creating a larger circle of scandal involving murky political doings over the course of Charlie’s career. Frightened for his life and knowing that Charlie wants to hunt him down, Dave fakes his own suicide and changes his identity. Meanwhile, literary agent Isabel Reed recognizes the volatility of what Dave has written and is extremely careful with the manuscript, but despite her best efforts, a few more hard copies start to circulate. One is with Jeffrey Fielder, an editor and Isabel’s best friend, and another is briefly “borrowed” from Fielder’s desk, copied and then shopped for movie rights by sexy Camilla Glyndon-Browning. Almost everyone physically connected with the manuscript starts getting killed in Charlie’s desperate attempt to quash this exposé of his past. Pavone knows the formula for a best-seller and keeps the reader turning the pages.
THE TRAITOR’S WIFE
Pataki, Allison Howard Books/Simon & Schuster (384 pp.) $14.99 paper | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-4767-3860-4
A young lady’s maid is witness to Benedict Arnold and his wife’s treachery in this fictional account set during the American War for Independence. This is the first novel from Pataki, daughter of former New York State Governor George E. Pataki. In a well-balanced narrative that interweaves historical detail with the lives of servant Clara Bell and her employers, Peggy Shippen Arnold and her husband, Pataki successfully captures an infamous act in American history. Following the death of her grandmother, Clara is received in the prominent Shippen home in Philadelphia, where she serves socialite sisters Betsy and Peggy. Peggy, the self-centered, calculating, beautiful sister, immediately dominates Clara’s time. She’s besotted with a British officer and is sympathetic to the loyalist cause—at least until the British flee the city and a rough-hewn colonial military governor, Benedict Arnold, arrives. Arnold, though much older and lame, represents social prominence to Peggy, and he falls for her manipulative wiles and showers her with goods he’s confiscated from British merchants. After they’re married, though, Peggy discovers Arnold can barely sustain the lifestyle she desires. He’s used much of his own wealth to pay his troops, and he’s yet to be reimbursed. Additionally, Arnold soon faces charges brought by his rival, the governor of Pennsylvania. Although most charges are dismissed, Arnold’s angry and believes he’s been treated unjustly. Peggy, ever the opportunist, recognizes a chance for monetary gain and seeks to reconnect with former lover John André, now head of British Intelligence. Although her husband initially resists, she convinces him to seek a commanding position at West Point, which paves the way for their ultimate act of treason. Clara is horrified as she observes the scheme unfold—she is, after all, a lowly servant who must worry about her future—but she’s also a patriot who does her best to foil the plot. Those familiar with U.S. history may already know how Arnold’s saga unfurls, but the author’s interpretation of events offers fresh perspective, plenty of intrigue and a host of interesting, multidimensional characters. Benedict Arnold isn’t a name that’s popular among patriotic Americans, but Pataki delivers an admirable book focused on the betrayal. 28
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FREE FALLING, AS IF IN A DREAM The Story of a Crime
Persson, Leif G.W. Translated by Norlen, Paul Pantheon (608 pp.) $27.95 | $13.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-307-37747-0 978-0-307-90785-1 e-book
Stark whodunit with a sharp political edge, examining the 1986 assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme of Sweden. Though the equivalent, in Swedish memory, of the assassination of JFK, Palme’s killing has served mostly as backdrop in that country’s superbly well-developed mystery fiction milieu. |
“It’s a small country,” Johansson grumbles. “Much too small.” Yet there’s plenty of room for mayhem. A worthy addition to the vast Swedish library devoted to such unpleasant things.
Persson (Another Time, Another Life, 2012, etc.), a criminologist in real life, places the killing at the forefront of this latest story, in which a CSI type named Lars Martin Johansson (familiar from other of Persson’s procedurals) moves to center stage as, years after the fact, he opens the cold file. “I’m only the head of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, but I’m also an orderly person and extremely allergic to unsolved cases.” Surrounded by a body of flatfoot cops and smart investigators, he finds his orderly tendencies thwarted by extremely messy trails of evidence, from subtly conflicting testimonies (“the perpetrator had...‘half run,’ ‘trotted,’ ‘lumbered,’ or ‘jogged’ down Tunnelgatan in the direction of the stairs up to Malmskillnadsgatan”) to leads that bring in a bewildering range of conspiratorial actors (one of them with a quite unmentionable name). Persson’s tale is too long by a quarter, with plenty of longueurs that seem to put the case in real time, but it has plenty of virtues, not least in showing how police work is actually done and in how quirky interpersonal dynamics can affect every detail of a crime investigation. To say nothing of calling the whole lone gunman scenario into question.
THE GOOD LUCK OF RIGHT NOW
Quick, Matthew Harper/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-06-228553-9 Quirky, feel-good fiction from the author of The Silver Linings Playbook (2008). Bartholomew Neil describes himself as having above-average intelligence, though it’s clear his intelligence is unconventional and idiosyncratic. Neil tells his story in a series of letters he writes to Richard Gere, a figure much admired by Neil’s
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Have no fear. Reich (Rules of Betrayal, 2010, etc.) supplies plenty of code-named acronyms and villains, a high body count, patient explanations of arcane financial transactions and regulations, and a heroine who prays to J. Edgar Hoover. How could the exchange, the nation and the free world possibly be in better hands?
mother. The novel opens with her death, a great loss for Bartholomew, who has lived with her for 38 years. Now he’s bereft and alone, relying on the ministrations of Wendy, his grief counselor, and Father McNamee, a priest at the church Bartholomew has faithfully attended for his entire life. Although at first it’s not quite clear what his motivation is, McNamee abruptly “defrocks himself ” to help take care of Bartholomew. In addition to caring for Bartholomew, he spends much time praying but also drinking a daily bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey, and by the end of the novel, it becomes clear that McNamee has much to atone for. Bartholomew is something of a holy innocent. He becomes enamored with the “Girlbrarian,” a woman he falls platonically in love with at the library he haunts. Through synchronicity (a key concept in the novel), it turns out the Girlbrarian, Elizabeth, has a brother, Max, going through grief counseling for his cat, Alice. Max, who can’t get through a single sentence without using the f-word, links up with Bartholomew through Wendy, and the novel switches to a road trip to Canada, where Bartholomew can supposedly discover a father he has long thought dead and Max can visit the “Cat Parliament” in Ottawa. A whimsical, clever narrative.
THE HAREM MIDWIFE
Rich, Roberta Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster (352 pp.) $16.00 paper | Feb. 25, 2014 978-1-4767-1280-2 A midwife in the palace of Sultan Murat III helps a poor Jewish harem girl in Rich’s follow-up to The Midwife of Venice (2012). In 16th-century Constantinople, Venetian exiles Hannah and Isaac Levi traverse the sometimes-treacherous streets and work to sustain themselves and their son. Isaac’s opened a silk workshop, and Hannah continues to ply her trade as a midwife. When she’s summoned to the palace by the sultan’s formidable mother, the Valide Nurbanu, Hannah’s tasked with examining a young girl whom the Valide wishes to present to her son as a gift. The Valide hopes newly acquired Leah will produce a strong heir and entice the sultan to forget his favorite wife, Safiye. After her village was pillaged and razed by marauders, feisty Leah, a Venetian Jew like Hannah, was taken captive and eventually sold into servitude. Hannah pities the girl and lies to the Valide to prevent Leah from being sent to a brothel. Hannah knows by doing so she’s risking her life, but she comes up with a risky ruse to conceal the lie. Back in Venice, when Isaac’s brother dies, a household maid assumes his widow Grazia’s identity and sails to Constantinople to carry out an elaborate scheme. With encouragement from a fellow conspirator, she refines the plot and, upon arriving in Constantinople, is welcomed and offered shelter by Hannah and Isaac. As Hannah again risks her family and friends to assist Leah, she develops reservations about her sister-in-law and worries about her marriage, her husband’s business and her status with the Valide. She’s prepared to die for her actions, but she doesn’t anticipate events that threaten the family’s stability and result in an unexpected ally. Rich embellishes her tale with graphic descriptions of life and death in Venetia and Constantinople during this era, and although her depictions are sometimes unpleasant to imagine, they add to the intrigue. The ending’s too nice for the guts-and-gore theme of the rest of the book, but the author ties up most loose threads and delivers an enthusiastic effort. This earthy account will please Rich fans.
THE PRINCE OF RISK
Reich, Christopher Doubleday (384 pp.) $25.95 | Dec. 3, 2013 978-0-385-53506-9
A hedge fund chief and his ex-wife, an FBI supervisory agent, work at odds to solve the murders of his father and her colleagues and prevent the meltdown of the world’s capital markets to boot. Whatever malfeasance Edward Astor, chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange, and his friends, Charles Hughes, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Treasury Secretary Martin Gelman, unearthed must have been a doozy. As they approach the White House to rouse the president from sleep and alert him to the peril, an unseen power takes control of their car and causes it to drive so recklessly that the Secret Service shoots it up, leaving them all dead. They’re followed in short order by three of Astor’s ex-wife Alex Forza’s fellow FBI agents when the agents pursue a tip to a Queens apartment and learn the hard way that an observant neighbor did indeed see cartons of automatic weapons coming into the place. Now it’s up to Astor’s son Bobby, who’s never been close to his father, and Alex, who hasn’t been close to Bobby for years, to avenge the murders. Even though Bobby and Alex are both obsessed with their separate cases, they have no idea how closely they’re intertwined. And most readers will be scratching their heads as well, wondering how a plot to ruin Bobby by manipulating the value of the Chinese yuan and cripple the New York Stock Exchange through “industrial espionage as state-sponsored covert policy” might be connected to the 30 cells of well-trained mercenaries who’ve sneaked into the country in a fine flourish of mayhem overkill. 30
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“...rambunctious and well-researched...” from the swan gondola
THE SWAN GONDOLA
Omaha’s World’s Fair is depicted as a downscale cousin to Chicago’s lavish 1893 exposition, but there’s still money to be made, and the couple perform on the midway daily (she’s Marie Antoinette, her head chopped off over and over daily) before meeting in the swan-shaped gondola of the title. Ferrett wants to get serious with Cecily, who has an infant daughter (the father is absent), but enter William Wakefield, a wealthy fair organizer who wants Cecily for himself. Schaffert captures the grandeur and strangeness of the fair pavilions, as well as the political ferment of the time. (President William McKinley, in the thick of the Spanish-American War, has a cameo.) Despite the novel’s widescreen setting, though, the central love story is thin and upended so quickly the reader is challenged to feel invested in Ferrett’s and Cecily’s fates. And though Schaffert uses fakery as an intriguing theme (ventriloquists, automatons, SpanishAmerican War propaganda), the closing chapters’ would-be ghost story has too much stage makeup to achieve its intended Oz-like effect. A rambunctious and well-researched but ungainly historical romance.
Schaffert, Timothy Riverhead (384 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 6, 2014 978-1-59448-609-8
A ventriloquist and actress pursue a rough-and-tumble romance in the shadow of the 1898 Omaha World’s Fair. Readers meet Ferret Skerritt, narrator of the second novel by Schaffert (Creative Writing and Literature/Univ. of NebraskaLincoln; The Coffins of Little Hope, 2011), as he accidentally crashes a hot air balloon into the home of two aging sisters. Ferret was heartbroken when he took flight and wounded after landing, but Schaffert plays up the absurdity of the incident in this entertaining if light novel. Flash back a few months earlier: We meet Ferrett as a one-time petty thief who’s getting by as a ventriloquist at a vaudeville theater, where he meets (and promptly falls for) Cecily, an actress with an obscure history.
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PANDEMIC
government invitation in 1931. She becomes the member coordinator and organizes the banally diverse group of women assigned to travel together: Jewish Minnie Siebert, who must defy her husband to travel from their farm in Bangor; Irish Catholic Boston housemaid Katie McDonald, who lost two sons in the war; and well-to-do society matriarch Mrs. Bobbie Olsen, who, like Cora, has a secret she’s not telling. The fifth member of the party, Wilhelmina Russell, does not respond to Cora’s letters, but Mrs. Russell does show up to travel on the train from Boston to New York. Only this is Selma Russell, a black seamstress, stereotypically large and comic—discomforting whiffs of race and class snobbery filter throughout the novel. A snafu has mixed up the two Mrs. Russells, and Wilhelmina, a deeply disturbed middle-class housewife recently released from a mental hospital for the journey, has ended up in Harlem. Assigned to chaperone the women, 2nd Lt. Thomas Hammond fixes the mix-up, with the help of nurse Lily Barnett, by resegregating the women before they board the ship for Europe. By the time they reach Europe, Cora and Bobbie have bonded, while romance between Thomas and Lily is palely flickering. In Paris, Cora meets journalist Griffin Reed. Badly wounded and disfigured while covering the war, he sees the possibility of a story in the women’s journey. Throw in Reed’s hedonistic lover and a nasty senior officer who resents Thomas’ privilege, and the trip goes more than slightly awry. While the line-by-line writing is engaging, this take on historic events is made shallow by broad brush strokes and lots of heartstring pulling. (Author tour to New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and New England)
Sigler, Scott Crown (432 pp.) $26.00 | Jan. 21, 2014 978-0-3074-0897-6 Yeah, yeah. Space zombies have taken over the world, courtesy of Sigler (Nocturnal, 2012, etc.) and his capable if derivative Infected series, which winds down with this volume. Fans of the series will know that it started as a kind of police procedural that got increasingly supernatural and sci-fi–ish, a kind of Childhood ’s End with oodles of mayhem. Sigler lays it on plenty thick here—among other things, the Navy is now blowing itself apart, half populated with the “infected” and half with swabbies still eligible for honorable discharge. And why the Navy? Because somewhere under Lake Michigan, something very strange is happening. Margaret Montoya, the tough and resourceful doctor who’s helped battle the alien virus, is back in action in a world full of unpretty pictures: “His own blood had baked flaky-dry on his skin. A softball-sized pustule on his left collarbone streamed black rot down his wide chest.” Eck. (And that’s not even to mention the severed penis that the dude is clutching, presumably his own.) It wouldn’t be a proper shoot’em-up without an assortment of Sgt. Rock types—Navy SEALs, Delta Force, top cops and ops, and so forth—with the usual gallows humor (“Your courage is immeasurable, Roger. If you don’t turn into a plant, drinks are on me”). Sigler excels at snappy dialogue, but the story itself is too familiar for anyone who grew up on a diet of The Omega Man and Aliens. Still, for those who can’t get enough of must-eat-brains yellow monster types with extremely bad attitudes, this is just the book. Will the Earthlings prevail? Cue Count Floyd, the old SCTV creature-feature host: “Oooh, very scary, boys and girls.” Or maybe not. Competent enough but without many surprises.
THE POLARIS PROTOCOL
Taylor, Brad Dutton (400 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-525-95397-5
Taylor’s latest thriller starring Pike Logan. This time, America’s enemies plot to subvert the Global Positioning System with the Polaris Protocol, a nefarious piece of computer code that threatens to wreak havoc with commercial transportation as well as America’s ability to hit military targets with precision. Logan’s Taskforce faces a couple of formidable adversaries, including the Ghost, an Arab terrorist who also appears in Enemy of Mine (2013), and the Sicario, a bloodthirsty Mexican assassin. Taskforce member Jennifer Cahill also must rescue her kidnapped brother, Jack, complicating her role in saving America. Here, as in other Pike Logan thrillers, America faces a potentially devastating threat; only the extralegal Taskforce can save the day, and that will happen only if Logan bends the rules. His semisecret girlfriend, Cahill (code name Koko), will continually need to prove she belongs on the team, which she does in impressive fashion. The Cold War may be long over, but the struggle between good and evil continues to provide fodder for nail-biting adventures.
A STAR FOR MRS. BLAKE
Smith, April Knopf (336 pp.) $25.95 | $10.99 e-book | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-307-95884-6 978-0-307-95885-3 e-book During the early 1930s, the U.S. government arranged for grieving “Gold Star Mothers” to visit the French burial sites of their sons killed during World War I. This historical fiction by mystery author Smith (White Shotgun, 2011, etc.) concerns a woman named Cora Blake and her travel companions. Plucky, no-nonsense Cora is a librarian from Deer Isle, Maine, and a single mother of a son, when she gets the |
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“...will appeal to readers who delight in allegory...” from the valley of masks
Admirers of the late Tom Clancy will enjoy this and other works in the series. Read them in any order.
fellow pilgrims follow a path of stern discipline of body and mind. The guiding force behind life in this valley is Aum, named after the primal sound in the universe, a spokesperson for the values of peace and self-liberation. The narrator has both self-discipline and strong motivation to work through the hierarchy of possibility he’s offered, first to become a Pathfinder and ultimately a Wafadar, in which he would “[a]chieve the perfect union of the two, mind and body, till they uncurled as seamlessly one, as do living flesh and bone.” After strenuous exertion (and some channeled sensual self-indulgence), the narrator becomes a Wafadar, but this warrior class starts to become a powerful force in its own right, engaging in appalling acts of violence and predation. Eventually, the narrator, once the hunter, becomes the hunted. Tejpal puts demands on the reader both through the entanglements of his narrative and through the specialized vocabulary (e.g., the Mausoleum of Our Egos, the Kiln of Inevitable Impulses) he generates. The narrative will appeal to readers who delight in allegory that is political, philosophical and convoluted.
THE VALLEY OF MASKS
Tejpal, Tarun J. Melville House (336 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-61219-262-8
An intricate allegory of wisdom and enlightenment but ultimately of corruption and the struggle for power. Although Tejpal starts the story with his narrator under siege, his life threatened by the Wafadars (a warrior clan to be feared), most of the narrative is recounted in a long flashback as the narrator reviews his life and explains how he got into his current perilous situation. He takes us back to a serene valley in northern India, closed off from the world, in which he and some
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STRANGE BODIES
SAINT MONKEY
Theroux, Marcel Farrar, Straus and Giroux (304 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-374-27065-0
Townsend, Jacinda Norton (288 pp.) $24.95 | Feb. 24, 2014 978-0-393-08004-9 The friendship between two black teenage girls in Kentucky flags when one of them moves to Harlem in this lowenergy first novel. In the 1950s, the small town of Mt. Sterling is strictly segregated. Audrey and Caroline are neighbors in the “colored” section. Audrey is only 11 when her beloved father, Lindell, enlists in the Air Force and dies his very first day in Korea (friendly fire). The shock drives her mother to drink; she works two jobs and is seldom home. Caroline’s situation is far worse. For starters, she’s plug ugly, inheriting unwelcome features from the white man who raped her grandmother. The horror comes when her mother disappears; she has been murdered and dismembered by her husband, known as Sonnyboy. He confesses but never explains why he killed his meek, faithful wife; Townsend’s awkward handling of the episode is a tear in the fabric. Caroline refuses to speak to her father again (incredibly, he only does five years jail time) but moves right along: “Ain’t like some big thing happened.” She’s first to snag a boyfriend, putting distance between the two friends. Audrey’s ace in the hole is her skill as a pianist. Mr. Glaser, a talent scout from the world-famous Apollo, hears her playing at a funeral and insists she come to New York. This is Audrey’s big moment—joining the Apollo house band at 17 and living in Harlem—but Townsend can’t make it shine, even when the bassist, August, 11 years her senior, falls for her big time. There will be rough sledding ahead for the lovebirds and for the two childhood friends; it’s Sonnyboy that has the smooth ride. Townsend has attempted a big-canvas novel, but it’s only in the close-knit Mt. Sterling neighborhood that she seems at home.
A labyrinthine exploration of identity and mortality, filled with big ideas that transcend the occasionally clunky plotting. As one of the more literary-minded of science-fiction novelists (or vice versa), Theroux (Far North, 2009, etc.) challenges summary in a novel that encompasses literary criticism (the protagonist is a Samuel Johnson scholar, or perhaps he was); a conspiracy between a record company mogul and Russian scientists that involves shifting an individual’s consciousness into a new body (or “carcass”); and a couple of possible love stories that may include romance between the living and the dead. Dr. Nicholas Slopen—the literary scholar and Johnson expert—has already been declared dead once, and perhaps twice, by the time the novel presents itself as the testimony found by a former lover on a flash memory stick. The document begins in a mental ward, where the patient is trying to convince his therapists that he is in fact Slopen, whose death has been well-documented. He then relates the tale of how he (Slopen) had been hired to document some newly discovered Johnson letters that he immediately dismissed as fake, before realizing that he was in the midst of something far more extraordinary and sinister. The letters were written by an initially nonverbal savant who was convinced that he was in fact Johnson and who eventually convinces the scholar that something stranger is afoot than fraud or even madness. “I felt I understood less and less, even as, intuitively, I was drawing closer to the hidden chamber of the infinitely dark truth.” And within that infinitely dark truth, distinctions between sanity and madness, life and death are not nearly as absolute as they might have initially appeared: “All madness has a touch of death to it....But the finer details of reality—the state of a marriage, artistic merit, a person’s true nature—have something delicate and consensual about them....Each time someone drops out of our collective reality, it weakens a little.” Often enthralling and occasionally maddening, the novel expands the reader’s sense of possibility even as it strains credulity.
THINGS FALL APART
Turtledove, Harry ROC/Penguin (416 pp.) $26.95 | Dec. 3, 2013 978-0-451-46568-9 Series: Supervolcano, 3
Another go ’round with the Ferguson family, supervolcano survivors and utter literary ciphers. Turtledove (The War That Came Early: Coup d’Etat, 2013, etc.) returns for a third installment of his Supervolcano series, which finds the Ferguson clan, along with the rest of society, struggling to recover from the massive eruption that has wreaked all manner of climatological and economic havoc on the once mighty United States of America. Turtledove alternates scenes featuring Colin |
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BECOMING JOSEPHINE
Ferguson, a gruff, cynical cop, and various members of his extended family to provide a panoramic view of post-eruption life; career woes, rampant inflation, the inconveniences of severe weather, reduced technological resources and relationship drama are the order of the day. Given the semiapocalyptic nature of Turtledove’s setting, the dramatic stakes of his story remain curiously muted, if not outright absent. In fact, there is little story to speak of, as the narrative limps back and forth among its cast of bland, undeveloped characters dealing with the frustrations of power outages and the like. The lack of any sort of narrative momentum edges into perversity as the author pads his meandering tale with surreally protracted episodes of, say, a cat getting into painfully unfunny shenanigans or a geologist experimenting with a slide rule. Turtledove’s premise is intriguing, but the prose style is gratingly folksy, turgid and weirdly out of touch despite copious references to Internet and texting conventions. A lifeless apocalyptic thriller/social drama.
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Webb, Heather Plume (320 pp.) $15.00 paper | Dec. 31, 2013 978-0-14-218065-5
Webb adds new frisson to the often fictionalized travails of an unlikely empress. Before she achieved the ultimate in distaff power, Josephine, nee Rose Tascher, was the least favorite daughter of a Caribbean sugar planter whose wealth was eroded by gambling. The death of a favored younger sister creates an opportunity for Josephine: In her sister’s stead, she is sent to Paris to wed Alexandre de Beauharnais. Her youthful expectations are soon dampened: While she gives birth to two children, Alexandre philanders. Fidelity in marriage is neither expected nor encouraged for either sex. (This is France, after all.) Josephine, schooled by her friend Fanny, hostess at one of Paris’ most illustrious salons, becomes an adept seductress. (In
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her 30s now, she is pressed for time.) Revolution interrupts her plan to be supported by a powerful man. Alexandre attempts to find his niche in the new regime, a strategy that will, eventually, lead straight to Madame Guillotine. Josephine languishes in a squalid prison for months. There, she meets Gen. Lazare Hoche, who becomes, pre-Napoleon, her first true love. Lazare engineers Josephine’s release, then departs for foreign service in the company of his new wife. Heartbroken, Josephine takes up with Paul Barras, Paris’ most notorious libertine and richest man, whose fortune derives from supplying revolutionary troops. He’s putty in Josephine’s hands until, all too soon, he’s not. Feeling more overshadowed than ever by time’s winged chariot, she takes up the military supply game herself and is almost ready to declare independence from men when she meets a certain height- and hygiene-challenged Corsican conqueror. After she finally succumbs to Napoleon’s persistent pleas for her hand, there is his large, scheming and vindictive family to contend with. Although the book covers the same ground as many other treatments of Josephine’s life and times, Webb’s portrayal of the range of Josephine’s experience—narrow escapes from bloodshed and disease, dinner-table diplomacy, and her helpless love for Napoleon, her children and a small dog—is exceptionally concise and colorful. A worthy fictional primer on Empress Josephine.
author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it’s set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive. Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
m ys t e r y THE PURITY OF VENGEANCE
Adler-Olsen, Jussi Dutton (400 pp.) $26.95 | Dec. 31, 2013 978-0-525-95401-9
THE MARTIAN
Another cold case for the sturdy misfits of Copenhagen’s Department Q, together with two more incomplete blasts from the past for Detective Carl Mørck. Except for the prostitute who reported her missing, no one much cared when brothel keeper Rita Nielsen vanished back in 1987, and it’s no wonder the case languished. Now, however, the mystery assumes new urgency with the news that she wasn’t the only one to disappear. The very same day, attorney Philip Nørvig, fisherman Viggo Mogensen, womens asylum guard Gitte Charles and do-nothing Tage Hermansen also went AWOL. Furthermore—though it takes Carl, his assistant, Hafez el-Assad, and his secretary, Rose Knudsen, quite a while to work this out—they all had links to Tage’s cousin Nete Hermansen, long immured in a Sprogø home for fallen women, whose second chance at a respectable life was dashed when Dr. Curt Wad, a stalwart of the Purity Party, confronted her and her businessman husband publicly with some sordid details of her past. Adler-Olsen (A Conspiracy of Faith, 2012, etc.) cuts back and forth between the fatal day in 1987 when Nete decided to avenge herself on the people who had ruined her life and the present day, when Carl’s investigation of both Nete and Wad is complicated by rumors that Carl helped his cousin Ronny kill Ronny’s father many years ago and further hints of the horrific fatality that first sent Carl to Department Q. Fans can rest assured that neither of these lesser subplots comes anywhere near closure. Another accomplished exercise in triple-decker suspense, though the climactic twist would be harder to predict if the story had ended 100 pages earlier.
Weir, Andy Crown (368 pp.) $24.00 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-8041-3902-1 When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir. One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he’d lost pressure in his suit, and they’d seen his bio-signs go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars’ first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The |
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THE MIDAS MURDERS
can grow and can their own food. Respected teacher and parttime sleuth Miss Dimple Kilpatrick is picking peaches with her fellow teachers, Charlie Carr and Annie Gardner, when Miss Dimple hears a scream. Only later do they learn that the lovely Prentice Blair has vanished from her job selling produce at the Peach Shed while her somewhat older best friend, Charlie’s sister Delia, was across the road buying some cold soda. When her body is found, her longtime boyfriend, Clay Jarrett, whose family owns the peach farm, is immediately suspected. Prentice and Clay had recently split, partly over her decision to go away to college even though he wanted to marry. In addition, Prentice had been depressed since the recent death of a woman who had been like a mother to her. Miss Dimple is certain that Clay does not have it in him to murder the woman he desperately loved, despite his admission that Prentice had told him she had sex with a man she didn’t name. A woman living in a nearby shack claims she saw the killer and found something that could identify him, but since she thinks that she’s Scarlett O’Hara battling both Yankees and Nazis, only Miss Dimple understands that her testimony might be worthwhile. When she’s found dead as well, Miss Dimple and her friends go all out to discover the identity of Prentice’s lover. Ballard’s latest exercise in nostalgia (Miss Dimple Suspects, 2013, etc.) presents more delightful characters tangled in a solid mystery.
Aspe, Pieter Translated by Doyle, Brian Pegasus Crime (336 pp.) $24.95 | Dec. 4, 2013 978-1-60598-487-2
Not only its citizens, but Bruges itself is under attack in this second case for Assistant Commissioner Pieter Van In to reach American shores. One moment, Adriaan Frenkel, a visitor from Holland, has no thoughts but whether he’ll ever get a proper drink at the Villa Italiana; the next, he’s listening avidly to an unexpectedly revealing conversation between two drinkers at the next table, local industrialist Georges Vandekerckhove and his German companion Dietrich Fiedle. “The son of that bastard!” Frenkel reflects about Fiedle. From that point on, things move swiftly. The next morning, Fiedle is found dying in Blinde Ezel Street, apparently the victim of an accidental hematoma. There’d be no case for Van In and his sometime lover, Assistant District Attorney Hannelore Maartens, if a photograph Fiedle was carrying of Michelangelo’s Madonna didn’t seem to suggest a link to an attack on a statue of Belgium’s greatest poet, Guido Gezelle. Mayor Pierre Moens and Chief Commissioner Carton, ever alert to terrorists but always looking under the wrong rocks for them, are no help at all. So Van In and Hannelore mount their own one-cylinder investigation. The first result, predictably, is an official reprimand. As the police focus on the links to the Mouvement Wallon Révolutionnaire, however, Van In, a hard-bitten, hard-drinking, hardwenching cop whose couplings with the whore Véronique are so inveterate that he doesn’t even think he’s cheating on his prosecutor, closes in on a plot that links the Nazi hoarding of Old Masters half a century ago to a fiendishly modern scheme to manipulate the real estate market in historic Bruges. Only Van In’s intuition and his knack for noticing important details can explain how this raffish cop could possibly keep his job in this jokey, down-and-dirty tour of a town that can’t make up its mind whether it’s a museum for tourists or a haven for crooks.
ONCE UPON A LIE
Barbieri, Maggie Minotaur (304 pp.) $24.99 | $11.99 e-book | Dec. 10, 2013 978-1-250-01167-1 978-1-250-01168-8 e-book The creator of the college-themed cozies in the Murder 101 series (Extra Credit, 2012, etc.) goes big in her first stand-alone. Maeve Conlon’s life is finally back on track after her husband, Cal, left her for her beautiful Brazilian best friend, Gabriela. A Culinary Institute grad, she’s made a success of the Comfort Zone, the gourmet shop she owns in Westchester County. And she’s making progress toward mastering single parenting: Her older daughter, Rebecca, is acing high school, although her younger daughter, Heather, may be hanging out with the wrong crowd. Maeve finds time to help her ex-cop father, Jack, adjust to life in Buena del Sol, the care community he moved into when Alzheimer’s disease started stealing his memory. She also summons up the courage to accompany Jo, her longtime friend and business partner, on her foray into speed dating. But her most promising prospect of the evening, the charmingly evasive Rodney, turns out to be a police detective. And Rodney’s got his sights set on Jack for the murder of Maeve’s cousin, Sean Donovan, who was found a short time ago in Van Cortlandt Park with his pants down and most of his head gone. Although there was no love lost between Maeve and Sean, who bullied her mercilessly as a child, Maeve
MISS DIMPLE PICKS A PECK OF TROUBLE
Ballard, Mignon F. Minotaur (272 pp.) $24.99 | $11.99 e-book | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-250-03562-2 978-1-250-03563-9 e-book A murder horrifies the residents of a small Georgia town already coping with the deprivations of wartime living. The blazing hot summer of 1944 is taking a toll on the hardy citizens of Elderberry, who consider themselves lucky to be living in a rural area where they 38
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“With its elegant prose and its incisive insight into the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Makana’s third appearance transcends genre, satisfying fans of both mystery and literary fiction.” from the ghost runner
SHADOWS OF DEATH
needs to pay attention to her cousin’s murder, if only to protect Jack. Soon, Maeve finds her life again spiraling out of control as multiple allegiances compete for her limited supply of patience. Grace and humor mark this tale of a woman trying to protect her family without losing herself.
Dams, Jeanne M. Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8280-6
Welcome to the Orkney Islands, home to Stone Age excavations and a very modern murderer. Retired Chief Constable Alan Nesbitt, his wife, Dorothy Martin, and their dog, Watson, arrive in Orkney in style. When their own car breaks down, they hire a plane and then a car to take them to the vacation apartment their potter friend Andrew has found for them. A recent Neolithic discovery proves fascinating to Dorothy, who was leery of the trip. But the fabulous finds at the dig on one of the smaller islands provoke disagreement among the farmer who lives there; Robert Fairweather, the director of the dig; Henry J. Carter, the wealthy, arrogant American who’s bankrolling it; and Charles Norquist, the fanatically purist director of the Ancient Orkney Museum. When Carter is found dead at the dig and an accident is ruled out, the farmer is the first suspect. The local authorities, overwhelmed by a terrorist threat, ask Alan to look quietly into the murder. Alan doesn’t fancy the farmer as the murderer despite the threats he made. So he, Dorothy and even Watson start digging for information that might implicate someone else. After Dorothy’s cleared of killing a feral cat, she finds the local women more than willing to talk. When Norquist vanishes, the sleuths decide that he’s either a person of interest or the next victim. To complicate matters still further, Norquist’s horror of a mother, who’s in a home suffering from mental problems, may hold the key to the mystery. Dams extends her list of pleasant British cozies (Murder at the Castle, 2013, etc.) with another installment marked by her trademark local color and another solid mystery.
THE GHOST RUNNER
Bilal, Parker Bloomsbury (432 pp.) $27.00 | Feb. 13, 2014 978-1-62040-340-2
The death of a teenage girl strikes painfully close to home for Sudanese private eye Makana. Cairo, 2002. Makana and his operative Sindbad are being handsomely paid by the imperious Magdy Ragab to follow her lawyer husband around, presumably for proof of his infidelity. Ironically, the supposed cheater separately contacts Makana and takes him to a clinic where a young woman named Karima lies dying after being severely burned. Comparisons to Makana’s daughter, Nasra, and wife, Muna, both tragically killed, wrench him emotionally and make it impossible for him to turn down the investigation of Karima’s burning, the details of which are shrouded in mystery. And how is she connected to the respected attorney and his wife? It’s easy to see that Makana needs to answer this question but hard to see how. When he asks Mrs. Ragab about it, she offers him more and more money but makes no personal disclosures. Later, on the street, Makana is buttonholed by a different woman who claims that she’s Magdy Ragab. Karima’s death only intensifies Makana’s commitment to the case even though his friend, Inspector Okasha, counsels him to abandon it. His probe takes Makana to the Sahara desert, where trouble follows. The mutilated corpse of a local qadi (judge) is found in the lake called Birket Siwa. Like Makana, he had been searching for the man believed to be Karima’s father. Whom can Makana trust? With its elegant prose and its incisive insight into the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Makana’s third appearance (Dogstar Rising, 2013, etc.) transcends genre, satisfying fans of both mystery and literary fiction.
SPIRITS REVIVED
Duncan, Alice Five Star (250 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 19, 2014 978-1-4328-2798-4
A fake spiritualist is shocked when she has a real ghostly experience. Daisy Gumm Majesty makes a living catering to the spiritualist beliefs of wealthy women near her Pasadena home. Since the suicide of her husband, who was unable to stand the physical and mental pain of the wounds he sustained in the Great War, she’s lived with her parents and Aunt Vi, watched over by her husband’s best friend, Pasadena detective Sam Rotondo. Imagine her surprise when the spirit of Eddie Hastings takes over her body at a séance. Declared a suicide, Eddie was actually murdered, and both he and his distressed mother call on Daisy for help. Daisy does not dare tell Sam, who’s always annoyed when she becomes involved in |
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CRY OF THE CHILDREN
murder cases (Ancient Spirits, 2012, etc.). Instead, she sets out to investigate on her own. Fortunately, an old friend is a secretary at the law firm of Eddie’s father, a man as widely disliked as Eddie was liked. Daisy also talks to her family doctor, who finds out from the coroner that Eddie died from a heroin overdose, although no needle or drugs were found. Sam is furious when Daisy tells him about the cause of death. Despite the care the powerful elder Hastings took to hush up Eddie’s death, however, Sam begins to investigate, thinking that it may be connected to a drug smuggling case he’s already working on. Despite Sam’s warnings, Daisy continues to poke into the case, only to find that a hornet’s nest awaits her. A slight, simple mystery for readers who’d like to learn more about life on both sides of the tracks in California during the Jazz Age.
Gregson, J.M. Severn House (224 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-0-7278-8286-8
Chief Supt. John Lambert and DS Bert Hook (Die Happy, 2011, etc.) face what every policeman dreads: a child-killer. When 24 hours pass with no result after Anthea Gibson first reports the disappearance of her 7-year-old daughter, Lucy, from the village fair, Lambert and Hook know that the outcome won’t be good. They keep on questioning the likely suspects: her mother’s boyfriend, Matt Boyd, who brought Lucy to the fair hoping to bond with her; brawny Irish fair worker Rory Burns, who has a nasty habit of looking up little girls’ dresses as he helps them onto the rides; dedicated pedophile Dennis Robson; and Big Julie Foster, a mentally challenged loner who once snatched an infant left in her pram outside a store while her oblivious mother shopped. They even question Anthea and her sad, estranged husband, Dean Gibson, who’s led a pathetic life in a dismal boardinghouse since Anthea shooed him out of their marital home to make way for the more promising Boyd. But the police know it’s just a matter of time, and sure enough, Lucy’s body washes up on the banks of the Wye, often described as one of the most beautiful rivers in England. And once it’s a case of murder, they bear down even harder, trying to stop the killer before more children come to harm. Gregson knows when to up the ante and when to bring his case to a close in this tense procedural.
THE INVISIBLE CODE
Fowler, Christopher Bantam (368 pp.) $26.00 | Dec. 17, 2013 978-0-345-52865-0
Two cases, from different but equally unexpected quarters, emerge for the staff of London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit. Beloved of fans but reviled by the Home Office, the PCU is being systematically starved for cases by Oskar Kasavian, the security supervisor hoping to diminish its capacity to bring scandal on her majesty’s government. So naturally, Arthur Bryant, the irascible polymath who’s one of the team’s senior members, goes out hunting for cases on his own. He’s fascinated by the death of Amy O’Connor, a part-time bar manager who was found in St. Bride’s Church after suffering a fatal heart attack with no apparent cause. This is the sort of thing we should be investigating, he tells his more sedate counterpart John May. Before they can establish their authority to intervene in a case that’s officially none of their business, another mystery arrives courtesy of none other than Oskar Kasavian, whose much younger Albanian wife, Sabira, is convinced she’s being hounded by evil spirits. Promised the moon (honors and titles, long-range security, freedom from ritual attempts to shut them down or zero out their budget) if they can figure out what’s tormenting Sabira, the PCU team sets to work. But Sabira’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic—she keeps insulting the well-bred wives of her husband’s Home Office colleagues in distressingly public settings—till she finally turns up dead in Sir John Soanes’ House, the legendary London museum, beneath one of the paintings in William Hogarth’s series The Rake’s Progress without a mark on her to indicate how she died. What can her death possibly have to do with Amy O’Connor’s? Mr. Bryant and a covey of diverse experts expatiate informatively on witchcraft, code-breaking and national defense. But there’s less warmth or humor or real mystery than in The Memory of Blood (2012) and other recent PCU outings. (Agent: Howard Morhaim) 40
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THE BLACK LIFE
Johnston, Paul Creme de la Crime (256 pp.) $28.95 | Dec. 1, 2013 978-1-78029-048-5 Scots/Greek private eye Alex Mavros’ sixth case sets him on the trail of an old man who’s recently been spotted in Thessaloniki even though he died in Auschwitz. Jewelry king Eliezer Samuel thought he’d finished mourning his uncle over 60 years ago. So he’s stunned when Ester Broudo tells Rabbi Savvas Rousso that she saw Aron Samuel outside a wedding. Though it defies belief that Aron could have survived and then hidden himself for all these years, Eliezer knows concentration camps’ records are notoriously unreliable. So he asks Alex, a well-known missing persons specialist, to fly to Thessaloniki along with Eliezer’s daughter, Rachel, to follow the trail of the apparition. Alex isn’t crazy about working with Rachel, who seems to have her own agenda, or leaving behind his ladylove, social worker Niki Glezou, who’s already distraught because she can’t get pregnant. But the bills for the home he shares with Niki must be paid, so he takes the job, hoping that he can stay |
THE FUNERAL OWL
one step ahead of the Son, the killer who survived Alex’s last case (The Green Lady, 2013) and swore vengeance. Unlike Alex, readers know from the beginning that Aron is indeed alive courtesy of alternating chapters told from his perspective that trace his story from World War II to the present. It’s such a horrifying tale that the odds of Alex surviving his encounter with “the abyss of the twentieth century’s greatest crime” unscathed seem negligible. Just as high a body count as Alex’s last two cases, though the Holocaust back story sharpens this one to a knife point.
Kelly, Jim Creme de la Crime (256 pp.) $28.95 | Dec. 1, 2013 978-1-78029-049-2 It’s open season for disasters, felonies and all manner of malfeasance in Cambridgeshire in journalist Philip Dryden’s seventh outing. Dryden has just been appointed editor of The Crow on the strength of his promise to raise the paper’s profile by launching a series of regional editions. The gods of journalism are cooperating by providing enough copy for a dozen editions. A surprisingly well-organized gang has stolen metal from the roof of Christ Church and half a dozen other local sites. Rev. Jennifer Temple-Wright, the vicar, is bent on evicting blind old Albe Haig from his tenancy in a church outbuilding. Inside the church hangs kitchen porter Sima Shuba, shot and crucified. Korean War veteran Jock Donovan swears he can hear excruciating high-pitched noises coming from the wind farm nearby. PC Stokely Powell wants Dryden to look into the murder of Muriel Calder’s farmer husband, Ronald, by three art thieves who went on a home-invasion spree over 10 years ago. Cabbie Humph Humphries’ daughter, Grace, goes missing. So do Julian Amhurst, a chemistry whiz despondent because he didn’t get into Cambridge, and Will Brinks, who spotted a pair of Boreal Owls, the rare funeral owls whose sighting indicates that death is at hand. They don’t know the half of it. Just as much criminal mischief as Nightrise (2013), but this time, Kelly makes no attempt to pull all the threads together. The result, sensitive and heartfelt to a fault, is the sort of round robin you might expect from the 87th Precinct: a dizzying range of twists and turns and an awful lot of loose ends.
RED 1-2-3
Katzenbach, John Mysterious Press (400 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-8021-2205-6 A disturbed author and devotee of crime fiction who views writing and killing as parts of the same intimate process targets three redheaded women in what he considers the grandest homicidal scheme ever. It has been 15 years since the Big Bad Wolf, as he calls himself, published a novel or killed anyone to give himself source material. After a series of well-received books, he suffered a decline in sales and attention. Attempting a comeback in his New England town, he plans on killing in quick succession a middle-aged internist, Karen, who practices stand-up comedy at night (Red 1); a young teacher, Sarah (Red 2), who has turned to vodka and barbiturates to get over the deaths of her husband and child in an accident; and a troubled high school basketball player, Jordan (Red 3), angry over her parents’ divorce. What BBW doesn’t envision is that after delivering a letter to each of these targets informing them they have been “selected” for death, they will cope with their fears, discover each other and attempt to turn the plot against him. When Mrs. Big Bad Wolf, the killer’s meek but inquisitive wife, senses something amiss is going on behind his locked office door, BBW has another complication for which he was not prepared. No less methodical than his killer, Katzenbach (What Comes Next, 2012, etc.; three of his previous novels have been made into films) lays out the book’s premise with efficiency. The bonding of the damsels in distress lends a strong human element to the proceedings and a touch of dark humor. Ultimately, the novel fails to deliver more than a few medium chills, and the climax is a letdown. But the suggestion there may be a sequel is as intriguing as it is welcome. “Little Red Riding Hood” has been taken on scarier spins in recent times, but the age-old tale provides a lively premise for this thriller about stalked women. (Agent: Moses Cardona)
KILLING CUPID
Levine, Laura Kensington (272 pp.) $25.00 | Dec. 31, 2013 978-0-7582-8503-4 A cynical freelancer would rather spend her time looking for love and chocolate than her boss’s killer. With a name like Jaine Austen, you’d think a woman would be the subject of romantic works of fiction, not the author of one. But when Jaine signs on to write the brochure for a fancy Beverly Hills matchmaking service, fiction appears to be her best strategy. The appropriately named Joy Amoroso is the owner and matchmaker of Dates of Joy, an agency that charges lonely singletons thousands to be set up with a bevy of beautiful mates featured in the agency’s look book. It’s too bad for clients that the book is just for show and that Joy couldn’t care less about their romantic futures so long as the money and Godiva chocolates |
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“...adds twists that may leave fans stunned.” from fair and tender ladies
MURDER ON INSEL POEL
don’t run out. Jaine ends up an ad hoc employee of the agency and, just to get enough copy material, even has to date one of the not-so-eligible bachelors. Luckily, the setup seems harmless, as the gentleman in question is quite a bit older than Jaine and finds himself immediately falling for her cat, Prozac. Not all dissatisfied clients, however, accept Dates of Joy’s poor services so nonchalantly. Nor can Joy’s employees stomach her indifference to their hard work. This widespread animosity is a problem when Joy is fatally poisoned by one of the chocolates she so loved, turning everyone into a suspect. Jaine is torn between investigating and supervising the budding romance of her dearest neighbor Lance Venable, who may have met Joy’s one winning bachelor. Even if Cupid’s arrow misses its mark, Levine’s charming heroine (Death of a Neighborhood Witch, 2012, etc.) is right on target.
Nelson, D-L Five Star (316 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 19, 2014 978-1-4328-2815-8
A small island off the coast of Germany provides the picturesque setting for some nasty murders. Annie Young makes a comfortable living as a multilingual tech writer, but her preference is historical research and translation. American-born but raised in several European countries, she’s engaged to a French police officer who’s none too happy with her penchant for getting involved in murder (Murder in Paris, 2013, etc.). Annie’s current job doing translations for a small museum on the island of Insel Poel is rudely interrupted when she finds the dead bodies of two Asian women on the beach. The ambitious local police officer is not interested in Annie’s opinions about his unidentified corpses, and her fiance warns her to stay out of it. In between finding bodies, she gets involved in the problems of one of the museum workers whose teen daughter, Greta, hates her stepfather, leading Annie to suspect the possibility of abuse. When Greta runs away, Annie helps find her. Trouble continues to come her way as she pokes into the murder investigation. The fifth in this capable series includes alternating World War II subplots about a half-Jewish woman and an RAF pilot with a connection to Insel Poel. Although the main mystery is wrapped up, readers are left to wonder whether those other stories will continue in the next installment.
THE SPOOK LIGHTS AFFAIR
Muller, Marcia; Pronzini, Bill Forge (256 pp.) $24.99 | Dec. 3, 2013 978-0-7653-3175-5
The year 1895 finds the partners of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services (The Bughouse Affair, 2013) working another pair of cases that turn out to be closely connected. Gold and real estate mogul Joseph St. Ives and his wife, Margaret, are pretty straight-laced as members of San Francisco’s nouveaux riches go. But their son David is already quite the rake, and their daughter Virginia insists on keeping company with Lucas Whiffing, who’s nothing more than a clerk at a sporting-goods store. Alarmed at his daughter’s intransigence, St. Ives hires Sabina Carpenter to keep an eye on her. That’s why Sabina’s on hand at mayor Adolph Sutro’s party, where Virginia tells her she hates her, runs out of the building and throws herself over a cliff. Or does she? Although she leaves a suicide note behind, her body is nowhere to be found. As St. Ives threatens Sabina with a lawsuit and worse, her partner, John Quincannon, is doing his best to follow the trail from a tipster to the bandit who relieved the Wells, Fargo Express of $35,000. The stakes are high for Quincannon, who stands to earn a 10 percent commission, but the risks are equally high, since the information he gets from Bob Cantwell leads to nothing but coshings and corpses and dark whispers about “the Kid.” Meanwhile, a sharp-eyed lunatic calling himself Sherlock Holmes continues to bedevil the sleuthing couple. The big mystery is transparent in its outline, and the details aren’t interesting enough to keep one reading. Veterans Muller and Pronzini have done better work, both alone and in collaboration. (Agent: Dominick Abel)
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FAIR AND TENDER LADIES
Nickson, Chris Creme de la Crime (224 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-1-78029-055-3
The time is 1734, the place Leeds, the problem multiple murders. As constable of Leeds, Richard Nottingham, along with his friend and able assistant John Sedgwick and Rob Lister, his daughter Emily’s boyfriend, tries to keep crime to a minimum. The city’s wealth is built on the wool trade, but a good many of its people live in abject poverty. So when a young rural lad comes looking for his runaway sister, Nottingham is not optimistic, since most young girls who arrive seeking a better life end up as prostitutes. Before Nottingham can discover anything, the young man is found with his throat cut. But that’s not the constable’s only problem. Emily, who’s running a charity school for poor girls, has been materially assisted by donations from a wealthy wool merchant and his friends. Now, someone is vandalizing the school. Despite Nottingham’s best efforts, the destruction continues. The return |
DYING FOR ATTENTION
of Tom Finer, a criminal Nottingham had thought dead, brings new problems when he strikes a deal with the powers that be to reopen the town’s dreaded workhouse. Even worse, the murdered man’s runaway sister is found dead in the river, and another young woman is found in a shallow grave; neither body shows any apparent signs of violence. The murder of his wife (At The Dying of the Year, 2013) has killed Nottingham’s zest for life, but since he still loves his family, his friends and the city he is sworn to protect, he doggedly continues his search for what may be a serial killer. To Nickson’s customary historical detail and social commentary, Nottingham’s latest adventure adds twists that may leave fans stunned.
Shannon, James T. Five Star (334 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 19, 2014 978-1-4328-2751-9
A stint of English teaching turns deadly in a New England town. When Matthew “Chug” O’Malley walked away from his job as a television reporter, his wife walked away from him. Now, he’s living alone in a cabin in Massachusetts and trying to write a book about his experiences as a substitute high school teacher. But his project takes a different turn when he receives a note whose hint at suicide demands attention. The school principal dismisses it as a prank until a student at Prescott High is found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning inside his car. Sgt. Miranda Cusack is as curious as Chug to discover why he received the note and why someone is shooting at him at his cabin. As the sergeant grows more certain that the supposed suicide was murder, and Chug grows more attracted to the sergeant, a second note purposely misleads Chug and everyone else who’s trying to protect the students. Too late to stop the murder of a sexy senior, and unprepared for another, even more shocking death, Chug finds the clues he needs in the sentence structure of the killer’s notes and in a couple of digits on another piece of paper that lead to an inevitable shootout in an enjoyable, if not exactly innovative, debut. Although you have to join the hero in questioning the killer’s motive, college English teacher Shannon offers well-rounded characters and a healthy dose of romance to balance out the bloodshed.
THEY DANCED BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON
Pagel, Tempa Five Star (316 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 19, 2014 978-1-4328-2799-1
A delightful dinner at a posh hotel ends in murder. Former social studies teacher Andy Gammon can never resist a historical mystery. But when she agrees to accompany her mother-in-law, Mayta, to the opening gala at the Grand Hotel of the Atlantic on the beautiful New Hampshire coast, she never imagines that she’ll find a body or immerse herself in a turn-of-the-century mystery. Andy’s tablemates include the bored boyfriend of Claudia Dean, who’s obsessed with the hotel’s history, which includes the mysterious disappearance of Marguerite, a young woman who later died in an asylum. When Claudia is found stabbed in one of the guest rooms, Andy’s sleuthing instincts kick in, and her long-suffering husband must care for their two children while Andy and Mayta locate and befriend Marguerite’s only known relative. Though she was from a well-off family and had become engaged to be married, Marguerite had been unhappy with the path her life was taking. At length, Andy learns that she’d run off from the hotel and married a local fisherman. After he drowned, her father placed Marguerite in a nearby mental hospital, a model of modernity in 1901. Andy goes so far as sneaking into the derelict asylum hoping to prevent another murder with roots in the past. Like Andy’s first case (Here’s the Church, Here’s the Steeple, 2006), this one is studded with flashbacks to the historical past, this time providing provocative insights into the now defunct system of asylums.
SHE’S LEAVING HOME
Shaw, William Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (432 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-316-24684-2 Pop-culture journalist Shaw digs back into the swinging ’60s to solve the murder of a Beatles fan. This debut novel introduces an unlikely pairing in “Paddy” Breen, an experienced, albeit cynical, criminal investigator on the London Metropolitan Police’s Murder Squad, and Helen Tozer, a new deputy constable assigned to the squad at a time when women were tokens. The year is 1968, and a body is found not too far from Abby Road and the Beatles’ recording studio. Breen and Tozer are assigned to work the case of the dead girl found under a mattress near a housing complex. The two soon develop a theory that she may have been one of the many groupies who spends their time hanging around the Beatles, hoping for a glimpse of the Fab Four. London and the youth culture are changing, and Breen is not ready for the upheaval, but Tozer, who hails from the countryside, embraces |
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A BAD REPUTATION
the times. Although an odd pair, they bond in an unexpected sort of way and soon find themselves puzzling through the case. Meanwhile, Breen fights his reputation as a coward, earned when he ran away during an attack on another officer. The investigation takes them into strange places, from a wealthy former model’s country estate to Beatle George Harrison’s driveway to a ball for the benefit of the impoverished nation of Biafra, but eventually, the police pair makes their way through mod London to find out who killed the girl and why. Shaw’s profession lends itself to accurately portraying London when the Beatles and Rolling Stones ruled the music charts, but in his hands, the residents of 1968 England (with the exception of Breen and Tozer’s parents) wax crude, rude and sometimes vulgar at the tamest of provocations. An interesting, albeit meandering, story about people who like neither the police nor one another.
Tesh, Jane Poisoned Pen (238 pp.) $24.95 | $14.95 paper | $22.95 Lg. Prt. Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4642-0230-8 978-1-4642-0232-2 paper 978-1-4642-0231-5 Lg. Prt. The murder of a millionaire stirs passions in a small North Carolina town. Former reluctant beauty queen Madeleine Maclin (A Hard Bargain, 2007, etc.) is now a private detective patrolling Celosia, a little town that provides her with a surprising amount of work. She and her husband, retired con man Jerry Fairweather, live in a large house he inherited from his uncle while Jerry, who refuses money from his wealthy family, searches for a job that doesn’t require him to swindle anyone. Small-town boy–madegood Wendall Clarke, arriving in Celosia with his beautiful wife, Flora, plans to open an art gallery. His ex-wife and several other local artists may be furious, but they still line up to get their work shown. When Wendall is found murdered at the gallery, Flora hires Madeleine, who makes some surprising discoveries, including Flora’s long list of former husbands, none of them rich enough for her tastes. In addition, Madeleine has troubles of her own. Honor Perkins arrives in town trying to entice Jerry back into con games and separate him from Madeleine. Jerry’s forced to get involved in several séances to keep Honor from causing too much trouble. Madeleine’s investigations reveal that some local artists have a lot to hide. But did any of them hate Wendall enough to kill him? Enjoyably quirky and sympathetic characters don’t quite make up for a weak mystery.
SHOOT THE WOMAN FIRST
Stroby, Wallace Minotaur (288 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Dec. 3, 2013 978-1-250-00038-5 978-1-250-02247-9 e-book An easy score for professional thief Crissa Stone (Kings of Midnight, 2012, etc.) and her associates turns out to be anything but. Detroit drug lord Marquis Jackson is so confident that nobody’s going to mess with his drop-off for dirty cash that he takes minimal precautions to safeguard it or even to keep it secret. He doesn’t reckon with Cordell King, an underling who’s just old and smart enough to share information about the cash with Crissa, her veteran colleague Larry Black, and Cordell’s own cousin Charlie Glass. Though Crissa and company don’t have much time to plan the heist, it goes off smooth as silk, until it doesn’t, and Crissa is on the run with a lot more money than she expected to be carrying and a determination to deliver half of it—$80,000—to Claudette, a stranger in Florida, and her daughter, Haley, 6. The women don’t exactly bond, and Crissa’s particularly uneasy about Claudette’s current boyfriend, Roy Mapes, a meth addict who’s seriously in debt to a pair of lowlife dealers. Back in Detroit, Marquis Jackson, who’s not about to take the theft lying down, offers ex-cop Frank Burke $10,000 if he can recover the loot before Jackson’s own confederates, who are better enforcers than detectives. Burke proves just as violent as Jackson’s underlings but a lot less loyal. He dutifully tracks down the survivors of the heist but executes them as quickly as he finds them and plots to keep the entire proceeds for himself. That plan will inevitably bring him up against Crissa and that Florida family, and when it does, sparks will fly, along with bullet casings of every caliber. Crissa’s third is another superior thriller—fast, tough and nasty—without a single extra sentence.
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THE HARLOT’S TALE
Thomas, Sam Minotaur (320 pp.) $24.99 | $11.99 e-book | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-250-01078-0 978-1-250-01078-0 e-book The people of York are already suffering from the sweltering summer of 1645 when, suddenly, a serial killer adds to their woes. It’s been a year since York fell into Puritan hands. While the civil war rages on in other places, the godly are trying to make York into a model city. Wealthy gentlewoman and midwife Bridget Hodgson and her assistant, Martha Hawkins, go about their business and keep quiet, although neither approves of Puritan rule. Encouraged by her success in helping to solve a murder the year before (The Midwife’s Tale, 2013), Bridget’s politically powerful, Puritan brother-in-law calls on her skills when a prostitute and her client are found brutally butchered with Bible verses in hand. Hezekiah Ward has recently arrived in York, and his fiery sermons reviling |
MURDER STRIKES A POSE
sinners have earned him a fanatical following, among them his wife, their son, Praise-God, and a number of dangerous former Puritan soldiers. So there’s no dearth of suspects for the murder, including one uncomfortably close to home. Bridget often gets help from her nephew, Will, whose physical disability has always placed him below his brother Joseph in his father’s affections. As a soldier, Joseph has often killed, and he’s fanatical about ridding York of sinners—exactly the profile that makes him an obvious suspect. As the killings continue, Bridget does everything in her power to discover the killer from among far too many candidates. The second adventure for Thomas’ midwife uses a mystery with plenty of twists, turns and suspects to illuminate a difficult period in British history.
Weber, Tracy Midnight Ink/Llewellyn (288 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jan. 8, 2014 978-0-7387-3968-7
A yoga teacher searches for the murderer of her homeless friend while dealing with the tribulations of the friend’s dog. Her yogilike heart inspires Kate Davidson to get to know the homeless man peddling the local charity newspaper Dollars for Change outside her yoga studio, even as his monster of a dog scares away some of her customers. It turns out that George wasn’t always on the street. He’s actually a failed entrepreneur with an equally big heart, even if he’s developed a weakness for a stiff drink. Before she knows it, Kate and George are sharing a kind of friendship. She even gets on the good side of Bella, his oversized dog. After George disappears for a few days with an enigmatic comment about coming into some money, Kate is worried when he doesn’t reappear as soon as she had expected. When he finally does return, he brings bad news: Bella is sick and needs lifetime medicine that costs hundreds per month. Before Kate and George can figure out how to deal with this dilemma, Kate finds a set of shoes around the back of her studio attached to a very dead George. The police are certain the death is an accident and don’t want to waste their time and resources on a homeless man anyway. But Kate feels that there’s something more to it. Why else would George be so certain about a future cash influx? Along with her troublemaking friend Rene and her potential new boyfriend, Michael, Kate works to uncover the truth behind George’s demise while also finding the perfect home for Bella, hopefully before the murderer returns for Kate. In spite of a few charmers, Weber’s debut falls flat. The premise and the details are just too sad for chick-lit fare.
THE PAWNBROKER
Thurlo, David; Thurlo, Aimée Minotaur (304 pp.) $25.99 | Jan. 28, 2014 978-1-250-02798-6 Two war veterans find that their special ops skills come in unexpectedly handy back stateside in Albuquerque, N.M. Only after purchasing the Three Balls pawnshop do Navajo Charlie Henry and his Anglo buddy Gordo Sweeney discover that former owner Diego Baza has wiped the computers. The records they need may be in a safe for which they have no combination or key. Charlie’s high school girlfriend Gina, now an attorney, agrees to meet Baza and hand over money for the information. That’s the extent of the good news. Charlie and Gordy watch from a distance as drive-by shooters take out Baza, with Gina as collateral damage. Gordy stays to help while Charlie races after the escaping killers. Gina’s roommate, Nancy, a police officer, gives them inside information to help them track down the killers while Gina slowly recovers. Since Baza was obviously the target, accessing his records may help uncover a motive. He had been stripping the business of cash, selling guns illegally and shopping for plane tickets for two adults and a child to Costa Rica. One of Baza’s former employees—a lovely woman with a young son and a reason to fly under the radar— has vanished. The dangerous duo soon become involved in gunfights with rival gangs as they track down the mystery woman and try to discover the motive for the pawnbroker’s murder. Fans of the Sister Agatha and Ella Clah mysteries (Ghost Medicine, 2013, etc.) will find the Thurlos’ new series kickoff more thriller than mystery, though there’s still a touch of the trademark Navajo lore.
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“...searching and intriguing...” from a darkling sea
A DARKLING SEA
science fiction and fantasy
Cambias, James L. Tor (352 pp.) $25.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-7653-3627-9 978-1-4668-2756-1 e-book
THE HIGH DRUID’S BLADE The Defenders of Shannara
Science-fiction novel from game designer and story writer Cambias, the first of a projected series. Like Jupiter’s Europa, Ilmatar is a moon of a giant gas planet. Here, under a roof of ice a kilometer thick and beneath a deep ocean, a team of Earth scientists has established a habitat in order to study the blind, intelligent aliens who resemble giant, lobsterlike, bald otters and whose home is this lightless, frigid, forbidding environment. The explorers have come to an agreement with a six-legged alien race, the Sholen, humanity’s first extraterrestrial contact, not to disturb the Ilmatarans or their habitat. But when media blowhard Henri Kerlerec persuades scientist Rob Freeman to venture out in secret so that Henri can use his new stealth diving suit to film the Ilmatarans up close, the Ilmatarans eventually detect him and, being scientists themselves and not recognizing him as intelligent or alien, dissect him. According to the Sholen, this constitutes interference; having repeatedly ruined their own planet, the Sholen’s misguided and self-appointed mission is to make sure nobody else ruins their planet either, so they order the humans to withdraw. Wary of the older, more advanced Sholen technology, the humans decide on passive resistance. Inevitably, matters slowly escalate into overt violence. More impressive than the worldbuilding, which is based on logical extrapolation, is Cambias’ diligent consideration of the technology required to survive in such an extreme environment. Best of all are the aliens. Ilmataran civilization is based on farming the products of deep-sea hot-water vents, while their perceptions and communications employ sound and pressure waves—although, since oxygen is poisonous to them, it’s difficult to envisage what gives them metabolic power enough to support intelligence. The Sholen behave according to consensus reached through political and sexual bonding. An exceptionally thoughtful, searching and intriguing debut.
Brooks, Terry Del Rey/Ballantine (336 pp.) $28.00 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-345-54070-6
Brooks (Witch Wraith, 2013, etc.) returns with a stand-alone Shannara novel starring Paxon Leah. The book is replete with sorcerers, druids, magical weapons and other familiar signifiers of the fantasy genre, but true wonder is in disappointingly short supply. The presence of mechanically powered airships and gunlike weapons distinguish the story somewhat from its obvious forebears, but at heart, Brooks’ story sits squarely—perhaps too squarely—in the tradition of Tolkien and his cohort. The narrative concerns the travails of one Paxon Leah, scion of a once-significant magical family, as he attempts to rescue his sister from an evil wizard bent on retrieving the Leahs’ magical sword. Paxon is aided in his efforts by the Druids, an order of magic users tasked with policing the use of arcane arts, who are locked in political struggle with the technology-favoring Federation; Arcannen, the sinister mage who kidnapped Paxon’s sister, plays both sides with the Leahs acting as his unwitting pawns. That’s about all there is to it: The bland characters are broadly drawn, afforded a basic characteristic or two (Paxon is noble and resolute, Arcannen is wicked and devious, etc.), the prose is risibly clunky, exposition is baldly delivered, often repeatedly, as if Brooks had forgotten he had already explained various plot points, and the depictions of magic and other fantastic elements of Paxon’s world are generic and feel secondhand. Brooks delivers some mild pleasures: The story does move briskly, and there are enjoyable bits of business involving battles with werewolves and scenes of supernatural combat, and the familiar stations of Paxon’s “hero’s journey” are comforting in their familiarity. Square, sturdy, straight-down-the-middle fantasy entertainment, enjoyable for the Shannara faithful.
THE WAKING ENGINE Edison, David Tor (400 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-7653-3486-2
Edison’s debut is an extraordinary and bewildering fantasy. In a multiverse consisting of unnumbered universes, nobody dies permanently; instead, they’re reincarnated in new bodies on different worlds with their memories of previous lives intact. Eventually, when the spirit finally tires of multiple lives, it’s drawn to the City Unspoken, 46
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where the gateway to True Death is located. At the city’s heart is an enigmatic mechanism, the vivistor, whose function is to grant True Death. Unfortunately, that function is failing. To the city comes Cooper, a gay man from Manhattan, summoned by Alouette, a goddess in disguise; he’s greeted by puzzled beauty Sesstri and the mysterious gray-skinned Asher, who fear the approach of the svarning (possibly an Icelandic word meaning conspiracy), a contagious collective insanity that threatens to destroy everything. Neither Sesstri nor Asher can find a use for Cooper, so they turn him loose. He finds himself in a vast, labyrinthine, overcrowded, rotting metropolis inhabited by murderous aristocrats like Purity Kloo; an insane faerie princess known as the Cicatrix; a captive angel or aesr; gangs of feral Death Boys such as the racist Nixon; psychic vampires or “liches”; the sadistic Lallowë Thyu; and reincarnated historical figures like Thea Philosopater, who was once Cleopatra—all of whom pursue their own unfathomable agendas while few seem inclined to seek True Death. (Then how did they get there? Did they all just get stuck in the gears?) Even a New Yorker like Cooper finds this bizarre; worse, he doesn’t remember dying or any previous lives, and he seems to be the only one in the city with a navel. Edison puts an impressive imagination to work and writes with clarity and precision. But with almost uniformly secretive main characters, the narrative lacks cohesion and drive, and the result, while often dazzling, offers little by way of involvement. A magic carpet ride—but the carpet just hovers. (Agent: Loretta Barrett)
THE UNDEAD POOL
Harrison, Kim Harper Voyager (512 pp.) $27.99 | $15.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-06-195793-2 978-0-06-230015-7 e-book Love and doom are in the air in this penultimate volume of a popular urban fantasy series (Ever After, 2013, etc.). After so many series installments infused with daywalking demon Rachel Morgan’s self-doubt, neuroses and rash behavior, it’s nice to see her finally achieve some emotional maturity, expand her circle of trust and seize some happiness for a change. If this novel had a theme song, it would be the Etta James version of “At Last.” Readers have been waiting quite a while for Rachel and elf Trent Kalamack to finally admit their feelings for each other and act on them, despite the hereditary enmity of their races and the fact that Trent is engaged to someone else. Fans will relish the moment and will also dig into the rest of the plot, which features Harrison’s usual (and usually enjoyable) Evil Conspiracy and labyrinthine plot twists, Rachel rushing to save the day. In this latest crisis, waves of wild magic are flowing from Rachel’s ley-line, causing charms to misfire, often with devastating results. The waves are also putting all of Cincinnati’s undead vampire masters to sleep, leaving the living vampires to rampage through the city. How have vampires |
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gained control over wild magic, which is the province of the elves? Is Rachel somehow responsible for these incidents, and if not, why do the waves seem to be tracking her? A great ride in and of itself, rather than simply a buildup to the finale, which is sure to be whiz-bang.
REFLECTED
Held, Rhiannon Tor (336 pp.) $15.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Feb. 18, 2014 978-0-7653-3039-0 978-1-4299-9114-8 e-book Third entry in Held’s werewolf saga (Tarnished, 2013, etc.). No surprises. Left damaged and without a wolf self after torture by the injection of silver nitrate, Silver nevertheless acquired certain advantages from her experiences: She can see the wolf selves of others, and her constant (invisible) companion, Death, makes trenchant observations and offers occasional advice. Silver and her mate, Andrew Dare Roanoke, now control the packs of the entire North American werewolf population. This time out, alas, readers should steel themselves for some absurdly contrived plotting. First, Held removes Dare from the proceedings by dispatching him to Alaska on the flimsiest of excuses. Next, Portland, a rare female alpha, shows up with her beta, Craig—the latter bringing a petition to require Portland to step down as alpha, since she’s pregnant (with his child). Silver’s problem is whether Craig is genuinely concerned or simply trying to force Portland to yield. Then, Sacramento, the other female alpha, disrespectfully pokes her nose in—Portland confided in her, there’s a mutual sexual attraction, and meanwhile, Sacramento has issues with her own sister. Finally, before he left, Dare gave his 18-year-old daughter, Felicia, an ultimatum: Get a job, go to college, or go roaming. But then Enrique shows up; a childhood friend from Spain (where Felicia was raised), he rapidly ingratiates himself with Felicia. But the alpha Madrid is Dare’s deadly enemy, and Enrique soon reveals a plot to force Felicia to help him discredit Silver. And Felicia, being 18, refuses to confide in Silver or anyone else. The characters are convincingly portrayed, their interactions ring true—mostly—and engage; the plot does neither. Fans only—and be prepared to take the rough with the smooth. (Agent: Cameron McClure)
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THREE PRINCES
Wheeler, Ramona Tor (320 pp.) $25.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-7653-3597-5
DO OR DIE
Brockmann, Suzanne Ballantine (448 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-345-54379-0 Series: Reluctant Heroes, 1
Steampunk alternate history yarn from the author of A Chance to Remember (2003, etc.) and various nonfiction books about Egypt. Julius Caesar married Queen Cleopatra, we learn, and founded the Pharoman Empire—although details of how this came about are sadly lacking. Now, in 1877, Pharaoh Djoser-George and his wife, Queen Sashetah Irene, rule much of Europe, Africa and Asia from their capital, Memphis, the only opposition being provided by conspirators Count Otto von Bismarck and Queen Victoria. Much of the empire’s wealth derives from their advanced “radiance technology.” Across the Atlantic, South America is governed by the Incan Empire of Tawantinsuyu, which has grown rich on its command of aeroship technology and whose Quetzal airships are navigated by flocks of highly trained, intelligent birds. Hearing a rumor that the old Incan emperor plans to send a man to the moon, Queen Sashetah Irene foresees, if true, a technological bonanza in which Egypt would want to be involved. So she sends two of her most accomplished spies, Lord Scott Oken, a prince of Albion, and alchemist professor Prince Mikel Mabruke of Nubia, to investigate. Harassed by Black Orchid assassins who may be in league with Bismarck, the pair reaches their destination, is given a warm welcome by Prince Viracocha and confirms the rumors—only to discover that the emperor has been murdered by his heir, Viracocha’s mad brother, Pachacuti. All this unfolds at a stately pace, the lavish details described with care and clarity—neither details nor characters, unfortunately, fascinate as much as the author seems to think— and the narrative, overloaded with titles and trappings, ends up (the sex scenes aside) juvenile in tone and outlook. Like static electricity: might give you a jolt but won’t keep the lights on.
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Attorney Phoebe Kruger is tasked with negotiating client Ian Dunn’s prison release, against his will, so he can rescue two kidnapped children, not realizing that doing so will set events in motion that will threaten dozens of lives—and a few hearts. Considering his reputation as a former Navy SEAL and a suspected international jewel thief, Phoebe finds it a little odd that Ian is in jail for getting drunk and losing control of his car. But when an accident incapacitates Ian’s usual attorney, Phoebe is sent in his place. As a recent hire at the respected firm that represents Ian, she isn’t surprised when he’s hesitant to work with her. She is shocked, however, that he’s unwilling to accept a sweetheart deal designed by the government to get him out of jail scot-free in exchange for rescuing two kidnapped kids without causing an international incident. What neither Phoebe nor Martell—the attorney working on behalf of the government—knows is that Ian has his own agenda for being in prison, and if he leaves, for whatever reason, it will threaten the people closest to him. So once they spring him, Ian takes Phoebe hostage, then must rescue his brother and his family from the mob, assemble a team, connect with the FBI, work out a rescue plan with limited resources, deal with the devil in the form of an international assassin and work through long-standing family issues while navigating a sizzling-yet-unwelcome attraction to his new, unasked-for attorney. As outlandish as the plot sounds on paper, Brockmann effortlessly and expertly tosses hundreds of details into the air and juggles them with brilliance. The first in her Reluctant Heroes series, the novel will captivate readers with its intense, action-filled plot, alpha-and-a-half hero, and his smart, perfect-for-him heroine, as well as secondary characters who contribute pathos and humor. Enthralling and breathtaking. (Agent: Steve Axelrod)
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“Three romance novelists known for sizzling, emotional stories deliver an entertaining, diverting set of novellas hot enough to warm a cold winter night.” from turn up the heat
SECRETS ON CEDAR KEY
selves. In Foster’s Love Won’t Wait, waitress Merrily is too old to be a virgin, and most men consider her virginity a challenge to conquer. She decides to proposition her customer/crush, Brick. He’s confident, wildly attractive and a good bet for great sex, but he also seems kind. Brick makes it clear that he’s a no-relationship kind of guy, but as he gets to know Merrily, it’s harder to maintain his well-established no-strings policy. In Ridgway’s Beach House Beginnings, it’s been 10 years since Meg lost Peter, her first love, to the sea. She’s avoided her idyllic, coastal family home ever since. Back for the first time, she is shocked to find herself attracted to a handsome visitor staying nearby. Too afraid to trust in happiness, she can’t deny she wouldn’t mind a little dalliance with Caleb, but emotions intrude when they connect on every level. Can his steady patience and gentle pressure convince Meg to believe in love and second chances? In Dahl’s Strong Enough to Love, we meet Jackson Hole photographer Eve Hill, who thought she’d never recover when the man she secretly loved went back to his estranged wife. Two years later, she’s still hurting but has created a successful career on the heels of his abandonment. What she doesn’t need is Brian, the man himself, showing up on her doorstep, whispering words of love and asking for understanding. She lost him once, and they’d never even touched. Now, she’ll give herself—and him— one night together, and then it’s over. She can’t risk that kind of heartbreak, no matter how good he is in bed. Or how many times he promises forever. Three romance novelists known for sizzling, emotional stories deliver an entertaining, diverting set of novellas hot enough to warm a cold winter night.
DuLong, Terri Kensington (320 pp.) $15.00 paper | Nov. 26, 2013 978-0-7582-8813-4
When a recent widow learns a shocking secret about her husband, she books a trip to Paris, hoping the time and distance will give her an opportunity to sort out her options, never expecting that the trip will give her a new chance at forgiveness and love. After the death of her husband, Marin moves back to the Florida island of Cedar Key, going into business with her mother, Dora, who owns the local yarn shop. Together, they have decided to take over the shop next door and expand into more needle crafts. As work begins on the new space, their contractor falls ill, and Dora and Marin learn that a wealthy neighbor does the occasional renovation project and that he is happy to help them out. Working together brings Marin and Worth close, and friendship and an attraction grow, one Marin will come to rely on as she learns that her husband had been unfaithful and left behind a 19-year-old daughter, Fiona. Marin decides to take a vacation to Paris to contemplate her options and decide how she might move forward and tell her grown sons about this new development. When she mentions that she’s having a hard time finding a hotel, Worth offers to let her use the apartment he owns in Paris and then decides to join her for part of her trip. Romance blooms, and when they return to Cedar Key, Marin feels prepared to deal with putting her bitterness behind her, while navigating how to integrate her husband’s child into the family. DuLong’s fifth installment of the Cedar Key series, lowkey, small-town romances designed around a knitting theme, proceeds as expected. Not much new ground here, and the plot marches along with steadfast good cheer and serendipity. Everything turns out better than anyone could have expected, and the characters feel blessed and grateful for that fact. Life-altering conflicts handled in simplistic, unrealistic yet heartwarming ways; more of the same for Cedar Key fans, who will love it.
REAVER
Ione, Larissa Grand Central Publishing (416 pp.) $8.00 paper | Dec. 17, 2013 978-1-455-52697-0 Warrior angel Reaver makes plans to rescue Harvester, the undercover agent who has played a fallen angel in hell for centuries, only to be abandoned to endless torture when her work is discovered; their journey to freedom is fraught with emotional and physical peril. Reaver risks everything to enter Satan’s realm and rescue Harvester, the angel who gave up her wings to enter the underworld as an undercover agent for heaven, served bravely for 5,000 years and then was left to eternal torture when her double life was discovered. Harvester and Reaver have a past, but most of Reaver’s early life has been wiped from his memory, so he’s not sure what they shared—though he’s pretty certain it’s complicated. First, he needs to get into Satan’s own compound, rescue a weakened Harvester and escape the hostile underworld; then he might be able to explore his past and his disconcerting emotions surrounding the darkly mysterious hellion. That is, if he can convince the archangels not to punish him for his flagrant disregard for their rules. Paranormal romance author Ione
TURN UP THE HEAT
Foster, Lori; Ridgway, Christie; Dahl, Victoria Harlequin (336 pp.) $7.99 paper | Dec. 31, 2013 978-0-373-77838-6 Three sizzling tales explore a “sexonly lovers” theme as a first step on the risky road to love. Three once-burned-in-love, twice-shy characters decide to explore passion rather than love by picking a sexual partner they decide won’t have access to their vulnerable emotional |
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continues her popular Demonica series with this latest addition, creating a mesmerizing story of star-crossed lovers separated by every possible means—time, memory, misunderstanding, divine realm and memory loss—yet somehow managing to find each other again. As outlandish as the premise sounds, and the worldbuilding might seem, the storyline is enthralling and remarkably elaborate, with a huge cast of characters that manages to keep the reader engaged and invested. Ione deftly moves through the complicated, imaginative plot with clarity and flair. Sexy, creative, darkly fanciful and chock full of action, devilry and intense emotion.
RIVER ROAD
Krentz, Jayne Ann Putnam (336 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-399-16512-2 Returning to Summer River after 13 years, Lucy Sheridan learns that a mortifying event from her adolescence was actually a rescue, and her teen crush and savior, Mason Fletcher, makes a great partner— in life and in crime investigation. As a forensic genealogist, Lucy is used to family disputes over money and property, so when her aunt and the woman’s partner are killed in a car accident and Lucy learns she’s inherited their estates—including some decisive shares in a familyowned company that is considering a merger—she is wary. Returning to her aunt’s home in Summer River after 13 years, Lucy runs into her teen crush, Mason Fletcher, who is taking a break from his security consulting firm. The last time Lucy visited her aunt in Summer River, she was a teenager, and Mason had pulled her out of a local party, humiliating her in the process. Turns out, though, that Tristan, the local magnetic-yetpsychopathic teen bad boy, had some nefarious plans for Lucy, and Mason had saved her from a devastating experience. Now that Lucy is back and knows the truth, that long-ago night casts a chilling shadow across Summer River as she and Mason make a stunning discovery in her aunt’s home, and an unknown accomplice to Tristan’s misdeeds will kill to protect long-buried secrets. Add in a power struggle for control of Lucy’s shares and the future of the company, a few more mysteries, a dead body or two, and a full slate of suspects, and Lucy and Mason have their hands full. Thankfully, they’re both really good at solving mysteries, since the more questions that arise, the more attention they draw from someone (or ones) who’d prefer they’d stop asking. As danger and attraction flare, Lucy and Mason are convinced they have a bright future together, if they can survive the investigation. Krentz returns to her romantic suspense roots with an intriguing premise set in charming wine country, using her typical finesse with dialogue, characterization and storytelling in support of an intricate and engrossing plot. Another Krentz winner.
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nonfiction THE SPLENDID THINGS WE PLANNED A Family Portrait
These titles earned the Kirkus Star: DARK INVASION by Howard Blum...................................................52
Bailey, Blake Norton (288 pp.) $25.95 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-393-23957-7
THE KID by Ben Bradlee Jr...................................................................52 THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN THE AGE OF EMANCIPATION by David Brion Davis.......................................................................... 57 HOW PARIS BECAME PARIS by Joan DeJean...................................58 THE PERFECT THEORY by Pedro G. Ferreira....................................62 EXTREME MEDICINE by Kevin Fong..................................................62 WINDFALL by McKenzie Funk............................................................63 PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.... 64 ONE WAY OUT by Alan Paul...............................................................76 THE TASTEMAKER by Edward White............................................... 84 PLENTY OF TIME WHEN WE GET HOME by Kayla Williams........ 84 ONE WAY OUT The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band
Paul, Alan St. Martin’s (416 pp.) $29.99 Feb. 18, 2014 978-1-250-04049-7
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An award-winning biographer reveals his troubled past. National Book Critics Circle Award winner Bailey (Creative Writing/Old Dominion Univ.; Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, 2013, etc.) justifies his attraction to alcoholic subjects (John Cheever, Richard Yates, Charles Jackson) in this bleak, repetitious memoir. Bailey’s father was Oklahoma’s assistant attorney general, his mother, a hard drinker trying to revive, in the Midwest, her bohemian Greenwich Village youth. Bailey and his older brother, Scott, became heavy drinkers in high school, even before their parents divorced, an event that disrupted an already strained family. Scott’s problems, though, went beyond drunkenness: At one point, a psychiatrist diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, a diagnosis that Bailey rejects—though he offers no other explanation for his brother’s erratic behavior, grandiose riffs, addictions, violence and ultimate suicide. Bailey chronicles Scott’s descent, but also notes that he, too, was an alcoholic. Scott, however, supplemented alcohol with various other drugs, including heroin. Their frustrated parents sometimes lashed out angrily, sometimes coddled their troubled sons. “Scott’s not as bad as you think. It’s not all black and white,” his mother told Bailey after Scott threatened to kill her. “There’s a little gray!” Some of Scott’s escapades seem like plots from a Cheever story: Scott “liked being in other people’s houses,” sneaking in during the night and staying for hours; in summer, he would “skulk around the suburbs,” bolting into family barbecues, stabbing meat and running off with it. The title of this memoir comes from a song Scott liked, Roy Clark’s 1969 “Yesterday When I was Young”: “…The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned/ I always built to last on weak and shifting sand.” Bailey gives no evidence of his or his brother’s splendid plans, only decades of depression, isolation and insidious self-absorption.
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“Sprawling, entertaining life of the baseball great, renowned as a sports hero while leading a life as checkered as Babe Ruth’s or Ty Cobb’s.” from the kid
ROMANCE IS MY DAY JOB A Memoir of Finding Love at Last Bloom, Patience Dutton (320 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 6, 2014 978-0-525-95438-5
A veteran editor of romance novels at Harlequin delivers a witty memoir of her history with romance. Unlike the novels she edits, her reallife relationships have been messy and the happy endings elusive. Bloom’s story begins at a private high school in Connecticut, when she invited “Harlequin-hero gorgeous” Kent to a formal dance only to be ditched, then rescued by the popular, “fiendishly cute” Sam, who swirls her around the dance floor and insisted they have their picture taken. The photo becomes an important factor later in the story. From high school to college to teaching to a successful editing career, readers follow the author’s quest for Mr. Right. She cleverly juxtaposes the conventions of romantic novels and movies with the challenges of maintaining a real relationship, avoiding maudlin territory. She chronicles her series of at-first-exciting but ultimately deficient boyfriends, and her encounters inspire a humorous contrast of romantic archetypes—“The Secretive Hero (Who May Be Hiding Something Really Bad),” “Dangerous and Sexy Alpha Male Heroes That Are Supposed to Have a Heart of Gold,” “The Beta Hero (Who Cooks and Isn’t a Tool)”—to their real-life counterparts. This is classic girls’-night-out dishing. Though the men in her memoir, with the exception of one, are more typecast than fully formed, the deeper thread here is the idea of self-evaluation and betterment. “This is the part of any romance novel that is never included, the mundane details, the forging ahead, the suffering that doesn’t involve pining for a boy,” she writes. Despite insecurities, Bloom, a survivor of a violent crime, reveals an inner strength and resolve to carry on. In the end, it’s not romance but something more elusive that Bloom finds: intimacy. Romance may wane as the quotidian details of cohabitation intrude on hearts and flowers, but that’s when true love begins.
DARK INVASION 1915: Germany’s Secret War Against America
Blum, Howard Harper/HarperCollins (512 pp.) $27.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-06-230755-2
Terrifically engaging and pertinent tale of the New York City bomb squad that foiled German terrorist plots against the United States at the outbreak of World War I. Vanity Fair contributor Blum (The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush, 2011, etc.) 52
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masterly retrieves this largely forgotten, haunting history of Germany’s subversive attempts to halt the U.S. ability to send munitions to the Allies fighting against it in Europe. The author pursues the key players in an episodic narrative: the agents of the Kaiser’s secret intelligence service, the Abteilung IIIB, with commander Walter Nicolai extending its tentacles across the Atlantic to fund a campaign of shipping terror amid the New York and New Jersey docks; the members of the New York Police Bomb and Neutrality Squad, led by the enterprising Capt. Tom Tunney, who had lately infiltrated the anarchist Brescia Circle and diverted its attempt to bomb St. Patrick’s Cathedral; and the strange and troubled Ivy League literature professor Erich Muenter, who went underground after poisoning his wife in 1906 and emerged as terrorist Frank Holt in 1915. The audacity of the German operatives, who received easy support from the plethora of German immigrants to America—e.g., the Hamburg-America Line officer Paul Koenig, who policed the shipyards in his thuggish way (“a thick-bodied, bull-necked man with long, drooping arms and iron fists that could seem as hellbent as a runaway trolley car when they were pounding away at your skull”) was matched by the ingenuity of Tunney, who had a nose for the right clue and method of infiltration. Blum creates some memorable portraits, accompanied by a lively gallery of photos, and keeps the heroic good-versus-evil plot simmering along in a nicely calibrated work of popular narrative history. Instructive, yes, but also as engrossing as good detective fiction. (56 b/w photos)
THE KID The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Bradlee Jr., Ben Little, Brown (864 pp.) $35.00 | Dec. 3, 2013 978-0-316-61435-1
Sprawling, entertaining life of the baseball great, renowned as a sports hero while leading a life as checkered as Babe Ruth’s or Ty Cobb’s. “My name is Ted Fuckin’ Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball.” So recited Williams, by Boston Globe editor Bradlee’s account, as a mantra before each game, “interrupting it only occasionally to offer a lecture on the finer points of hitting to anyone who cared to listen.” He had the credentials to deliver such lectures, of course; Bradlee does indeed acknowledge him as “the greatest hitter who ever lived,” and few in baseball have bettered Williams’ numbers. Like Ruth, Williams was a bruiser with a chip on his shoulder; like Cobb, race was his bête noire, for, as Bradlee reveals, Williams had a Mexican mother and took great pains to conceal that ancestry, both fearful of discrimination and perhaps with an element of self-loathing. Williams had a reputation as a military hero as well, which he did nothing to gainsay, even if he did his best to stay out of the draft in World War II and resisted his reactivation during the Korean War. Williams ended life with a bit of sideways fame as well, having been
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decapitated and frozen after death in a cryonics venture that did not end well; Bradlee’s description of the macabre proceedings is not for the faint of heart. The author dishes plenty—one of the kindest things he says about Williams as a human being was that he was “self-absorbed”—but the repeated demonstrations of flawed character do nothing to diminish Williams’ outsized stature as a player. Bradlee is as enthusiastic as Vin Scully or Harry Caray when it comes to describing Williams on the field: “He allowed three hits, one run, walked none, and struck out Rudy York on three pitches. The move seemed an attempt… to placate angry fans with some pure entertainment in one of the worst losses of the year.” An outstanding addition to the literature of baseball.
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LET ME OFF AT THE TOP! My Classy Life and Other Musings
Burgundy, Ron Crown Archetype (224 pp.) $22.00 | Nov. 19, 2013 978-0-8041-3957-1
A paean to silly self-regard from the master of the genre, TV anchor Burgundy. Burgundy is, of course, a fictitious character, the product of comedian Will Ferrell. There’s a Pinocchio moment toward the end of this looping book, full of sound but empty of signification, when he calls it “a novel about my life,” even as he deems the two Anchorman franchise films to date “factual documentaries about myself.” Roll with it, then: Burgundy, a native of a little town in Iowa named for a sectarian murderer and full of people who just didn’t quite have the gumption to head further west, has made himself an enduring star of the small screen, a jazz flautist, dog lover and collector of “authentic replications of Spanish
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“A solid memoir of political lives from both sides of the spectrum.” from love & war
broadswords.” And let’s not forget connoisseur of peaty adult beverages: “There’s nothing so bad on God’s green earth that can’t be made good by a tall glass of scotch.” That may be, but even a fifth of the firth’s finest can’t mask the fundamental so-whatness of this artifact. The satire is broad to the point of micrometer-thinness, the targets all the usual suspects, the put-on chauvinism and arrogance just more of the same for anyone who’s seen the films—and who besides the films’ fans would plunk down the money for this book? Stephen Colbert has done wonders with his similarly broad-brushed character, but this is second-tier stuff. Even if Burgundy (or whoever the writer is) occasionally lands a point, it seems almost accidental, as when Burgundy senior tells his anchor-boy son, “Ron, sometimes people don’t want the truth. They just want the news.” A stocking stuffer for die-hard Burgundians or a gag gift to bring to Wes Mantooth’s holiday party, but nothing more than that.
LOVE & WAR Twenty Years, Three Presidents, Two Daughters and One Louisiana Home Carville, James; Matalin, Mary Blue Rider Press (352 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-399-16724-9
A strangely compelling dueling memoir by the improbably matched political couple. Chicago-native Republican strategist Matalin (Letters to My Daughters, 2004) and New Orleans-born Bill Clinton campaign manager Carville (co-author: It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!, 2012) alternate relentless takes on the events of the last 20 years—both public news stories, such as the 2000 presidential election recount that deeply shook their marriage, and private milestones like moving with their two then-tweenage daughters to New Orleans from Washington, D.C., in 2008. Matalin garners the lion’s share of space, as she discourses on events and personalities in more leisurely, mannered detail, especially the two years she worked as assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney (dispensing the standard talking points for the media meant, “it was up to you to make processed canned food taste garden fresh”). In his pithy style, Carville gets in some good digs of his own. For example, he recounts his simmering resentment at his wife for taking that same VP job in the first place, suppressing an uncivil urge to wish her “good luck on cutting taxes for rich people on her way out the door.” Both are funny in their fashions and respectful of and loving toward the other—rather incredibly, considering their vast ideological divides. In one illuminating tale, Carville tells of the post-9/11 Christmas holiday the family had to spend near the Cheneys in Wyoming, which he made the best of despite the fact that “we were surrounded by Republicans.” In spite of Matalin’s gushing praise of “Poppy” Bush, Lee Atwater, Rush Limbaugh and others, and despite Carville’s merciless jabs at their “boneheaded positions,” the couple’s revelatory account of Carville’s late-life 54
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diagnosis of ADHD and their work to rebuild their hometown prove miraculously touching. A solid memoir of political lives from both sides of the spectrum. (16-page b/w insert)
THE TOOTH FAIRY A Memoir Chase, Clifford Overlook (256 pp.) $24.95 | Feb. 6, 2014 978-1-4683-0695-8
Fragments come together to reveal a life. Novelist and memoirist Chase (Winkie, 2006, etc.), who chronicled his brother’s death from AIDS in The Hurry-Up Song (1995), constructs this book—partly a documentary of his life, partly a meditation on living—in the form of “aphorism-like statements” which, “when added one to another, might accrue to make some larger statement that will placate despair.” The passages, most not longer than a sentence or two, contain random observations; journal entries; remembered dreams; overheard remarks; and bits of conversations with Chase’s partner, therapist, parents, co-workers and friends. He records losing his baby teeth, rewarded by a dime from the tooth fairy—a rare happy memory of his boyhood. His parents’ contentious marriage, he writes, resulted in his “crippling inner turmoil as an adult.” Emotional turmoil has been fueled, too, by his struggle to admit his homosexuality, “The odd nature of the closet, the open secret, not only to others but to oneself.” Lost “in the forest” of his feelings, he engaged in an affair with an emotionally fragile woman. “But this isn’t merely a story of sexual confusion,” he admits, “rather of self-doubt, which is bigger.” He doubts, above all, his ability to love and to be loved: “As the reader may have noticed, I like to mingle love with panic, self-doubt, and conjecture.” Chase writes movingly of his parents’ serious health problems and deaths and his brother’s tragic last years. He recounts travels to Rome and Egypt with his partner and reflects on the emotional impact of 9/11. Ellipses are as forceful as words: “[L]et the white space between these sentences stand for what couldn’t be seen then; or what can’t be remembered now….” Coherence is a contrivance of any life story, Chase implies in his candid and insightful memoir; some truths may be shared in words, others hidden between the lines.
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THE TRIPLE PACKAGE How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America
Chua, Amy; Rubenfeld, Jed Penguin Press (304 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-59420-546-0
Husband and wife professors at Yale Law School explore why some cultural groups in the United States are generally more successful than others. Chua made waves in 2011 with her controversial best-selling book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which contrasted the highexpectation stance of a certain kind of Chinese mother with that of the relatively relaxed style of most other mothers in America. This book explores the reasons why some groups, such as those of Asian heritage, are succeeding disproportionately to their numbers in the population at large. (Yes, tiger mothering has something to do with it.) Why do Asian-Americans dominate
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admissions at the Ivy League and other top universities? Why are so many Nobel Prize winners Jewish? Why are there so many Mormon CEOs? Why are Nigerian-born Americans overrepresented among doctorates and MDs? Chua and Rubenfeld (The Death Instinct, 2010, etc.) argue that each of these groups is endowed with a “triple package” of values that together make for a potent engine driving members to high rates of success: Each views their group as special (think of the Jewish idea of “the chosen people”); each has instilled in them an insecurity about their worthiness that can only be palliated by achievement; and each is taught the values of impulse control and hard work. The authors claim that the U.S. was originally a triplepackage nation. However, while Americans still view their country as exceptional, in the last 30 years, the other two parts of the package have gone out the window, replaced by a popular culture that values egalitarianism, self-esteem and instant gratification, creating a vacuum for more motivated groups to fill. On a highly touchy subject, the authors tread carefully, backing their assertions with copious notes. Though coolly and cogently argued, this book is bound to be the spark for many potentially heated discussions.
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THE LONGEST DATE Life as a Wife
Chupack, Cindy Viking (224 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 6, 2014 978-0-670-02553-4
An award-winning TV writer and magazine sex columnist gives the scoop on the “honest, horrible, hysterical truth about the early years of marriage.” Nearing 40, Chupack had racked up “enough relationship wreckage to fill a book” and one failed marriage to a gay man. Then she met Ian, the player who unexpectedly became a prince—and her second husband. Despite years of relationship experience, however, the author came to this second marriage with no real insight into the endless compromises “forever” entailed and immediately began discovering truths about love she hadn’t counted on. Colds made her otherwise handsome husband seem weak and unattractive, while negative feelings she had about her body made Ian upset, especially when they kept them “from having fun.” Sharing space with another person—especially someone like Ian, who “left evidence of life all around the house”—could be difficult for a “neat freak” like her. Although she adored her husband, she could not love his belongings, which inevitably displaced the ordered, elegant world she had created for herself. The one exception was Ian’s dog, whose drooling and hair shedding became two more lessons in acceptance. Chupack also chronicles the heartbreaking struggles with infertility that left her and her husband teetering on the edge of despair. Only after the two of them decided to adopt did things change. Suddenly, they were caretakers of a life beyond themselves, and the formerly self-centered author was now a “citizen of the world,” actively seeking, and celebrating, connection with others. Marriage and motherhood, Chupack concludes, are not the happy endings everyone dreams they will be. Rather, they are beginnings that, for all the pain and loss they may entail, offer the chance to “see higher highs than you ever imagined.” A straight-talking, funny and poignant memoir.
JIM CRAMER’S GET RICH CAREFULLY Cramer, James J. Blue Rider Press (448 pp.) $29.95 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-0-399-16818-5
Forget about getting rich quick: The new investment climate, writes Mad Money host Cramer (Jim Cramer’s Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World, 2005, etc.), is “treacherous…[B]izarre stock movements have become the staple, if not the hallmark, of this era.” It’s an age of “random gyrations” and irrationality, and the 2010 “flash crash” may have been a technical hiccup, but it’s spooked investors ever since—and Cramer, formerly known 56
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for his exuberant approach (and often lampooned for it), has since taken a visibly more deliberate approach to the matter. This new book reflects his caution. For one thing, he observes early on, the stock market is now “hostage” to sector exchangetraded funds whose movements make the fundamentals meaningless; the big-basket approach is the tail that wags the dog. Of course, ETFs are easier to own than individually selected stocks, and, as Cramer observes, if you want to understand the cyclical nature of the market, you “have to be on top of world events, particularly in China, pretty much every day,” which, in theory, is just what fund managers do. Still, the author stresses fundamental wisdom pitched at different categories of investors: For a conservative investor, for instance, he recommends “pipeline master limited partnerships” as a point of entry into the energy market, while he notes the tea-cup shifts in commodity producers like Domino’s Pizza that, properly timed, can yield wealth. But who can time the market? Not the Federal Reserve, for sure, for its minutes are a month old and are worth “nothing at all.” Cramer’s long list of dos and don’ts (Relative valuations don’t justify a purchase”; “Stop falling in love with your stocks”) is worth the price of the book. Look to this book for guiding principles rather than specific tips.
THE PARTY’S OVER How the Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became a Democrat
Crist, Charlie with Henican, Ellis Dutton (320 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-525-95441-5
With the assistance of Henican (coauthor, with Dwight Gooden: Doc, 2013, etc.), the former Republican governor of Florida explains why he is now a Democrat. Echoing the words of Ronald Reagan, Crist told the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, “I didn’t leave the Republican Party. It left me.” Many Republicans thought Crist’s betrayal began about four years earlier. At a rally in support of the new president’s economic stimulus package, Crist not only appeared on the same stage as Obama, but got a hug from him to boot. For Republicans, the embrace symbolized Crist’s defiance of current party wisdom that Obama was to be opposed at all costs. For Crist, this Republican “tribalism” was “silly—and wrong,” but his memoir gives evidence that he and his lifelong party had been diverging long before then. Crist was ashamed when the Florida fiasco of 2000 ended with the U.S. Supreme Court awarding the state’s electoral votes and the whole election to George W. Bush, who happened to be brother of then-Governor Jeb Bush. As governor himself six years later, he would upset his party when he pushed to make voting easier for all Floridians, even for former felons. Still calling himself “pro-life,” in practice, he has been loath to use his political offices to come between women and their doctors. As Florida
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“A distinguished historian brings his monumental trilogy to a stirring conclusion.” from the problem of slavery in the age of emancipation
attorney general in 2005, he steered clear of the Terri Schiavo case and was aghast when the Bushes and congressional Republicans tried to use the power of the state to force the comatose woman’s husband to keep her on life support. Democrats, of course, will eat up Crist’s self-presentation as common-sense populist, as well as his unflattering portraits of the Bushes, Karl Rove, Sarah Palin and many other GOP and tea party stars. Republicans will find little to cheer about here, but independent-minded readers might enjoy this front-row view of Florida politics at the turn of the millennium.
MERMAID A Memoir of Resilience Cronin, Eileen Norton (336 pp.) $26.95 | Jan. 20, 2014 978-0-393-08901-1
A clinical psychologist’s memoir about how she uncovered the truth behind the family secret that surrounded her disability. Cronin was just 3 years old when she realized that while her siblings had “two legs and a bunch of toes,” her own body ended at the knees. When she asked why, her Catholic mother would say that it was because God had chosen her “to carry the cross.” Yet none of the other members of her family ever treated her as though she were different. That all changed when she entered school. She wore prosthetic legs but discovered that she would have to fight to win other people’s acceptance. Despite her physical challenges and the fact that her mother would be diagnosed with mental illness, Cronin still managed to have a relatively normal adolescence, which included parties, boyfriends and a healthy dose of sexual experimentation. It wasn’t until college, though, that Cronin became painfully aware that she wasn’t just, as one therapist suggested, a “mermaid” making her way in a two-legged world: She was disabled. Anger drove her to alcohol and to the destruction of meaningful personal relationships. At the same time, it also fueled her break with traditional Catholic expectations that she dedicate her life solely to motherhood and pushed her to demand answers about why she had been born legless. Investigation into her parents’ pasts finally confirmed what she had long suspected: that it was her mother’s use of thalidomide during pregnancy that had caused her deformities. Cronin’s confrontation with family secrets eventually allowed her to enjoy a successful career and marriage. Perhaps the greatest achievement with this book, which brings to light one of the great medical tragedies of the 20th century, is that she is able to tell her story with a winning combination of candor, grace and humor.
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THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN THE AGE OF EMANCIPATION
Davis, David Brion Knopf (448 pp.) $30.00 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-307-26909-6
A distinguished historian brings his monumental trilogy to a stirring conclusion. Throughout a lifetime of scholarship devoted to the subject, Davis (Emeritus, History/Yale Univ.; Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, 2006, etc.) has more than established his bona fides as a leading authority on slavery. Here, he considers the decades between the 1780s and the 1880s and the moral achievement of the eradication of human bondage. He eschews a survey in favor of a “highly selective” study of aspects of the Age of Emancipation, particularly as manifest in Britain and the United States. As a predicate, Davis discusses the dehumanizing of slaves (and the scientific racism that perfected this notion), a sordid piece of work that impeded any thought of immediate emancipation, and the Haitian revolution, an example of self-emancipation that horrified whites and was a source of unending pride and hope to abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. The author’s treatment of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade and its emancipation act and America’s grappling with the problem of slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War and the 13th Amendment rests on the impeccable scholarship we’ve come to expect, but the triumph here is the sympathetic imagination he brings to the topic. For example, his thorough and intriguing discussion of the American Colonization Society and the colonization movement, a phenomenon derided by many modern historians, helps us understand how the notion arose, how it attracted right-thinking individuals from Jefferson to Lincoln, and how it became discredited, in no small part due to the efforts of free blacks. In a memorable passage, Davis places himself in the minds of a free black abolitionist and a white abolitionist in the antebellum North to articulate attitudes and illustrate the tensions, even among allies, in a noble struggle. Deeply researched, ingeniously argued.
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THE NEWS A User’s Manual
de Botton, Alain Pantheon (272 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-307-37912-2 978-0-307-91172-8 e-book
Philosophical gadfly de Botton (How to Think More About Sex, 2012, etc.) has ruminated, delightfully and often incisively, on the meaning of status, architecture, travel, Proust, sex, work, religion and love. Now he turns his attention to the news industry. “What should the news ideally be?” asks the author. “What are the deep needs to which it should cater? How could it optimally enrich us?” De Botton insists that the overriding function of news is to make us better people. News about dire crimes, for example, tells us “how badly we need to keep controlling ourselves by showing us what happens when people don’t.” Journalists should foster a sense of community, using their immense “power to assemble the picture that citizens end up having of one another.” We need foreign news that imparts the texture of other places and people and “ignites our interest in events by remaining open to some of the lessons of art, a news that lets the poets, the travel writers and the novelists impart aspects of their crafts to journalists.” We can learn more from Shakespeare and Flaubert, he believes, than, say, the Huffington Post. Unfortunately, de Botton’s agenda for newsgathering is too often didactic and naïve. He is not a fan of capitalism or consumerism, and he wishes that economic journalists could be “guided by a sense of where one should be going, operating with an economic Utopia in mind.” In the weakest chapters, the author asks why readers are captivated by celebrity and envious of the rich and famous. He ignores investigative journalism that churns out films, books and documentaries that do ask hard questions. In the end, he urges us to forego news as distraction—especially on the Internet—and master “the art of being patient midwives to our own thoughts.” How does news shape our thoughts and lives? That’s a significant question, but de Botton’s musings fall short of a serious response. (b/w illustrations throughout)
HOW PARIS BECAME PARIS The Invention of the Modern City DeJean, Joan Bloomsbury (320 pp.) $30.00 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-60819-591-6
Illuminating portrait of the first modern city, 17th-century Paris, which could “hold a visitor’s attention with quite dif-
ferent splendors.” DeJean (Romance Languages/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual—and the Modern Home 58
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Began, 2009, etc.) focuses on two kings, Henry IV and his grandson, Louis XIV, who lived 250 years before Baron Haussmann, the great public works leader who massively renovated Paris during the mid-1800s. When the author examines how the Pont Neuf, completed in 1607, was the key to the birth of the city, readers will immediately understand why it was designed and constructed there. Crossing the Seine at the Île de la Cité, it included the first sidewalks anywhere, and it was the first bridge in Paris to offer a gathering place with a view of the river. Suddenly, ladies and gentlemen were out promenading, seeing and being seen. Adding Place des Vosges (originally a silk factory) and the mansions on Île Saint-Louis gave the population the first true neighborhoods. People-watching on the streets raised awareness of fashion and introduced various forms of communication, as well as the first forms of advertising. Pedestrians began to shop using the first shopping guide, printed in 1690. Of course, thievery rose with the presence of the elite, so the first street lighting was installed. Since there was light, the shops stayed open well into the evenings—hence, the “city of light.” Both Henry and Louis built central Paris in just over 100 years, and we can still walk and explore what they left for us. “Paris caused urban planners to invent what a city should be,” writes the author, “and it caused visitors to dream of what a city might be.” Dejean obviously knows and loves Paris, and she provides coherent history that effectively explains the evolution of a city built by a few prescient men. (b/w illustrations throughout; 8-page color insert)
THE DEMOGRAPHIC CLIFF How to Survive and Prosper During the Great Deflation of 2014-2019
Dent, Jr., Harry S. Portfolio (368 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-59184-727-4
Talk about timing the market: Demographer Dent (The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Crash Following the Greatest Boom in History, 2009, etc.) studies generational trends that suggest hard times are in store, particularly for younger people entering the workforce. Though the economy seems to be recovering, writes the author, this is a result of “endless government stimulus” that must come to an end. With the retirement of the baby boomer generation and the subsequent restrictions imposed on the economy by the fact that fewer workers will be replacing them, consumer spending will decline, since those workers will likely have less money to spend even as the boomers are in the “downward phase” in their own purchasing patterns. The “echo boomers,” whose births are spread out from 1976 to 2007, will eventually replace the baby boomers, and they’re significantly more numerous. Meanwhile, the Gen Xers— less than half the echo boomers’ number—are going to have to pull a lot of weight. The near-term result? A “coma economy” such as
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Japan’s. The good news, if it is in fact good news, is that China is not likely to overwhelm the West economically, since its demographic future is even more dire. The bad news for nativists is that in order to re-emerge economically, the United States will have to see a population growth to 420 million by 2060, and much of that will have to come from immigration, which is likely instead to slow in the coming “winter season.” Dent closes by examining the place of social entitlements in a newly austere economic landscape; refreshingly, he urges that “there should be “a government-driven one-payer system for the most basic health care services for all,” adding that the free market system is intended to benefit everyone, “not just the strongest.” Provocative reading: a bad-case, if not worst-case, scenario that portends tough times ahead. Let’s hope Dent is erring on the side of pessimism.
THE TRUTH ABOUT TRUST How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More
DeSteno, David Hudson Street/Penguin (304 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-1-59463-123-8
New research on the never-ending debate about trust. “Trust isn’t only a concern that emerges at big moments in our lives,” writes DeSteno (Psychology/Northeastern Univ.; Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us, 2013) in his fact-filled analysis of this age-old concept. “[I]ssues of trust permeate our days…and it’s often what’s below the surface of consciousness that can have the greatest influence on a life well lived.” Through extensive research and chronicles of his progressive experiments, the author leads readers on a quest to identify not only what trust really means, but how it informs almost every decision a person makes throughout the day. Issues of morality, loyalty, competence, what’s fair and what’s not, and how to reliably follow your gut’s reaction to a situation are just some of the aspects of this multidimensional behavior DeSteno examines. In concise prose backed by engaging stories, the author addresses the pros and cons of common issues such as trusting a business transaction, using trust in learning situations and the need for trust in personal relationships. DeSteno’s studies extend beyond these parameters to consider the trust necessary to launch into social media and other cyber-related connections, where visual cues are not available but where trust is still an important factor in any kind of transaction. The author identifies the nuances of physical nonverbal signs that identify trustworthiness and also explains how an examination of the self can help readers know whether they can even trust themselves to behave with willpower and morality. DeSteno ends with six powerful and easy-to-remember rules regarding trust with the hope that the overall effect will be for the greater good of all. Fresh insight into a necessary part of everyday life.
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SLAVERY’S EXILES The Story of the American Maroons Diouf, Sylviane A. New York Univ. (384 pp.) $29.95 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-8147-2437-8
A curator at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture reconstructs the lives of blacks who sought freedom and selfdetermination on the margins of an American slave society. Whether newly arrived from Africa or already acculturated to the demands of servitude, whether they fled to the hinterlands to live in secluded swamps or in the mountains, or to the borderlands, close by farms, plantations or towns, the maroons ran away intending to stay away, seeking autonomy even at the price of unspeakable danger. Most were captured and suffered barbaric whippings or brandings, some died of exposure or hunger, some were killed by the militia, the slave patrols and dogs—a memorable passage here details the various repellents the slaves devised to throw bloodhounds off the track—set after them. But many survived for weeks, months and even years, offering hope to their enslaved companions and a powerful rebuke to the white power structure. From the colonial era to the 1860s, Diouf (Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, 2007, etc.) explains how the maroons lived, the skills and protective strategies they developed, how they sheltered themselves and traded in the underground economy, how they hunted, gathered and even raised crops, how they stole necessary clothing, tools and livestock, and how they depended on the complicity of their enslaved companions for survival. She tells the story of a few large communities, most notably that of the Great Dismal Swamp, and briefly examines the marronage subgroups of bandits and insurrectionists, but the triumph here is the author’s portrait of the day-to-day precariousness of maroon lives, the courage and resourcefulness required for survival, and the terrible price they paid for trying to recover their freedom. A neglected chapter of the American slave experience brought sensitively and vividly to life.
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BIG BANG DISRUPTION Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation
FROM THE TREE TO THE LABYRINTH Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation
Downes, Larry; Nunes, Paul Portfolio (304 pp.) $29.95 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-59184-690-1
Two leaders in the field of technological applications and business productivity present dramatic evidence for the emergence of a new model for economic innovation, which they call “exponential technology,” and warn that “every industry is now at risk” and must learn how to negotiate the new landscape. Corporate strategy consultant Downes (co-author: Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance, 1998) and Nunes (co-author: Jumping the S-Curve: How to Beat the Growth Cycle, Get on Top and Stay There, 2011, etc.), the global managing director of research at the Accenture Institute for High Performance, call their model “the shark fin” due to its ominously familiar shape: a quick vertical launch followed almost immediately by rapid collapse. The world’s billion-plus users of smartphone technology form a customer base that has permitted rapid reduction of the costs of implementing new technologies. The authors review Google’s free mapping app, which rendered stand-alone GPS technologies obsolete, just as the GPS devices had buried traditional mapmakers like Rand McNally. Downes and Nunes also discuss how Amazon has further transformed publishing and bookselling with each new iteration of the Kindle e-reader. The authors include traditional industries, as well, from automobile and pharmaceuticals to glassmaking and pinball machines. Combined with their treatment of the effects of Moore’s Law (regarding the doubling rate of semiconductor power and the reduction of unit price) and Metcalfe’s Law (regarding the value of networked goods), their argument becomes extremely appealing. The cumulative effects of both laws extend down the supply chain, dramatically cheapening costs and increasing returns to scale. “As exponential technologies and the disruptors they spawn remake your industry in ever-shorter cycles of creative disruption,” they conclude, “the most valuable asset you can have is speed.” With informative graphics, the authors deliver a groundbreaking outline for dealing with the inevitable increase in business disruptions caused by new technology.
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Eco, Umberto Harvard Univ. (590 pp.) $39.95 | Feb. 3, 2014 978-0-674-04918-5
The acclaimed author of The Name of the Rose (1980) and Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) returns with a deeply academic collection of previously published essays, speeches and a book review, all examining issues in semiotics, linguistics and medieval history. Not for the faint of heart—or for those who neglected their homework in Latin or world history—this anthology is for scholars, philosophers, historians, linguists and semioticians. Novelist and literary critic Eco (Emeritus, Semiotics/Univ. of Bologna; The Prague Cemetery, 2011, etc.) has revised each of the pieces, and they retain their full academic regalia: parenthetical citations, long block quotations and dense footnotes. He begins with a discussion of the semantic differences between dictionaries and encyclopedias and then proceeds to a historical analysis of metaphor and a tracing of the philosophical use of the dog—and the barking dog—in the thinking of some heavyweights like Augustine, Abelard, Aquinas and Roger Bacon. Among the more interesting selections is one about how people in the Middle Ages viewed fakes and copies. Since they had few ways to determine authenticity, they were more accepting of them. Dante figures prominently in a number of the pieces. We learn that he accepted the biblical account of the variety of Earth’s languages, and Eco explains the notion that God perhaps gave Adam a sort of Chomsky-an universal grammar rather than an actual language—though he also acknowledges the long attempt to demonstrate that Hebrew was the language of Adam. Eco is generally generous to other scholars, but he does go after Benedetto Croce for a “lack of precision” and an “extremely limited familiarity with the arts.” Another engaging essay deals with what he calls “natural semiosis,” and he revisits and reaffirms some thoughts about Kant and the platypus. Lush, comprehensive scholarship aimed at a very limited academic readership. (41 line illustrations; 4 tables)
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“An illuminating view of an era whose reform spirit would live on in the 1960s civil rights movement.” from the wars of reconstruction
THE WARS OF RECONSTRUCTION The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era
MY COUNTRY, ’TIS OF THEE My Faith, My Family, Our Future
Ellison, Keith Gallery Books/Karen Hunter Publishing (304 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-1-4516-6687-8
Egerton, Douglas R. Bloomsbury (464 pp.) $30.00 | Jan. 21, 2014 978-1-60819-566-4
A richly detailed history of former slaves’ rising to political involvement in the American South after the Civil War. Egerton (History/Le Moyne Coll.; Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War, 2010, etc.) recalls Reconstruction at the state and local levels, where thousands of black veterans, activists, ministers, assemblymen and others, with help from white allies, integrated streetcars and schools and ran for office in this “first progressive era in the nation’s history.” It was a remarkable time: Black voting and education surged across the South, and African-Americans held three of four congressional seats in South Carolina—the state most identified with slavery and secession. Many forces were at work: More than 175,000 African-Americans had served in the Union Army, and many became voters, activists, and eventually, state and federal officeholders. The federal Freedmen’s Bureau sponsored hundreds of schools for freed children, and black churches became increasingly significant. For all that, the “window of enormous opportunity” for reform was lost, mainly due to inaction by Andrew Johnson, “a racist, accidental president,” and whites’ guerrilla war against black Republicans. As states passed black codes to stymie gains, whites torched interracial schools and churches, blaming Northern agitators for filling freedmen’s heads with visions of equality. Egerton offers sharp sketches of freedmen, including Tunis Campbell, a black activist who supervised resettlement in Georgia; Oberlin-educated Blanche Kelso Bruce, who served as a U.S. senator from Mississippi; and war hero Robert Smalls, whose mistreatment on a Charleston streetcar prompted threats of a boycott of public transportation. He suggests that popular culture (Gone with the Wind, etc.) has sentimentalized the Old South and inaccurately portrayed Reconstruction as a vindictive, undemocratic period. An illuminating view of an era whose reform spirit would live on in the 1960s civil rights movement. (b/w illustrations throughout)
An engaging memoir on what it means to be a black Muslim in American government. Raised in the 1970s in Detroit and Minneapolis in a household where hard work and discipline were the rules, not the exception, Ellison’s childhood was saturated with tales of the struggles his extended family had endured to achieve racial equality under the Jim Crow laws. He juggled being an uppermiddle-class black Catholic youth on track to succeed despite the street gangs, unemployment and drug deals commonplace in Detroit. From these beginnings, Ellison created his own vision of a post–civil rights society, “a new inclusive perspective” of society for which he was willing to stand up and fight. His desire for a more balanced, kind and fair world corresponded with the views he found in the Quran, and Ellison quickly converted to Islam. As an activist, he recognized that the best way to create the changes he envisioned was to become an active member of government. “I understood that we could make a difference in our homes, and in our communities—but we also could make a difference in our country by participating in government instead of just criticizing it,” he writes. This led to his ongoing career in national politics, eventually giving rise to his election to Congress, the first black Muslim to hold such an office. With insights into the famous leaders who have influenced him, Ellison passionately details the concepts that still divide America and offers suggestions on how the country can move beyond the color of a person’s skin or religious belief to create a nation of the people, for the people. The empowering words of an insightful American who has risen to a place in government where his actions can really make a difference.
OUR AMERICA A Hispanic History of the United States Fernández-Armesto, Felipe Norton (416 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 20, 2014 978-0-393-23953-9
A welcome corrective to Anglocentric versions of American history, which continue to dominate the textbook market—thanks, at least in some measure, to diversity-doubting Texas. Texas, of course, is a key place in a historical geography that predates Jamestown and Plymouth Rock by a century. Spanish |
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“...one of the best popular accounts of how Einstein and his followers have been trying to explain the universe for decades.” from the perfect theory
missionaries and conquistadors were busily colonizing what are now California and Florida well before the arrival of other European powers, and as historian Herbert Eugene Bolton noted a century ago, their presence left a deep imprint on the places they settled: “[T]he Southwest,” he wrote, “is as Spanish in color and historical background as New England is Puritan, as New York is Dutch, or as New Orleans is French.” In a sense, Fernández-Armesto’s (History/Univ. of Notre Dame; Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration, 2006, etc.) argument is an extension of Bolton’s, though with more political fire behind it and a keen sense of the injustices perpetrated when Hispanic America came under Anglo sway. For that reason, he offers “a history of the United States…slanted toward a Hispanic perspective,” one that extends across the southern tier of the United States—embracing in particular Florida, which, the author is quick to remind us, is fast tracking to a minority-majority population in which 85 percent of people under the age of 5 speak some language other than English at home. Fernández-Armesto makes numerous important observations, noting that Spain’s New World empire grew so large in part due to competition with those other European powers, and he takes in episodes of history that are largely overlooked—e.g., the El Paso “salt war,” in which Anglos and Hispanics fought for control of that critically important resource. The correctives are useful and necessary, and it is easy to imagine that this book will become required reading in ethnic-studies courses—and, with luck, in American history survey courses as well.
THE PERFECT THEORY A Century of Geniuses and the Battle Over General Relativity
Ferreira, Pedro G. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (304 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-547-55489-1
Ferreira (Astrophysics/Univ. of Oxford; The State of the Universe: A Primer in Modern Cosmology, 2006, etc.) writes an enthusiastic and comprehensible popular account of how Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity continues to generate new knowledge as well as hints of more secrets to be revealed. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity may be the greatest discovery in science. It’s the key to understanding the history of the universe, the nature of time, stars, galaxies and matter itself. With the dramatic 1919 announcement confirming the theory’s prediction that gravity bends light rays, Einstein became a media superstar, and physicists began a search for other predictions that continues to this day. Everyone during that time, Einstein included, assumed that stars and galaxies drifted at random. Several physicists pointed out that his equations indicated an expanding universe. Reluctantly, Einstein finally agreed. Others calculated that when a large, aging star collapses, gravity shrinks it into an infinitely dense point outside of time 62
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and space: a black hole. However, Einstein never accepted that. During the 1920s, many physicists turned their attention to quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, which, unlike relativity, had vivid consequences. Only with the 1950s did a new generation return to the research. Simultaneously, astronomers began discovering phenomena that required relativity, including quasars, neutron stars, gravitational lenses, dark matter, energy and black holes. The perfection of Einstein’s theory remains; none of its predictions have been proven wrong, but the stubborn refusal of gravity to unite with all other natural forces remains a frustrating problem. Ferreira does not downplay relativity’s complexity and avoids the easy route of oversimplifying it into a cosmic magic show. The result is one of the best popular accounts of how Einstein and his followers have been trying to explain the universe for decades.
EXTREME MEDICINE How Exploration Transformed Medicine in the Twentieth Century Fong, Kevin Penguin Press (304 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 10, 2014 978-1-59420-470-8
The founder of the Centre for Altitude, Space, and Extreme Environment Medicine examines the connections between extraordinary advances in modern medicine and the experiences of explorers, mountaineers, soldiers and others who face extreme conditions. An intensive-care physician who also studied astrophysics and engineering, Guardian contributor Fong shares a unique point of view on the development of intensive care as a medical discipline. “Much of the [modern] advance [in saving life]…has come through wrapping fragile human physiology in concentric layers of artificial life support and allowing it to be projected into extremes that we were never before able to survive,” writes the author, who provides many fascinating examples—e.g., in 1999, the miraculous recovery of a Norwegian doctor who almost died after a skiing accident. When rescued after being submerged in icy water for more than 40 minutes after a fall, she was not breathing and had no discernible pulse. Her medical colleagues used heroic methods to save her, calling upon the skills of a surgical anesthesiologist and applying techniques pioneered in open-heart surgery. This prompted the recognition that deliberately inducing “hypothermic arrest” and bringing a patient to the point of death extended the time available for complex, life-threatening surgical operations. Similarly, the treatment of wartime casualties during World War II led to major advances in the treatment of severe burns—and the first successful face transplant in 2009. The key was to artificially maintain blood circulation in skin grafts to the affected areas. Fong believes that the demands of manned space flights to Mars will drive new frontiers of medicine. Today, we are only
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WINDFALL The Booming Business of Global Warming
beginning to deal with medical problems (e.g., loss of calcium in bones, inner-ear problems with balance) faced by astronauts who spend time in zero-gravity environments and then return to Earth. A medical thriller of the first order.
BEYOND ADDICTION How Science and Kindness Help People Change
Foote, Jeffrey; Wilkens, Carrie; Kosanke, Nicole with Higgs, Stephanie Scribner (320 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-1-4767-0947-5
A sensible, family-focused guide to substance abuse. In addressing family members who feel helpless when faced with addiction, Foote, Wilkens, and Kosanke draw on 40 years of substantiated analysis and clinical research from their Manhattan-based Center for Motivation and Change, a collective recovery treatment program founded on the hopeful principle that “people get better.” All three are aggressive proponents of the Community Reinforcement Approach and Family Training rehabilitation strategy, which introduces a real-world, motivational, coordinated approach to a loved one’s substance abuse. The guidebook begins with the basics, describing the nature of addiction as a “complex and multidetermined” problem, how it takes hold, and its underlying psychological causation, which can vary from chronic depression to bipolar disorder. With the assistance of co-author Higgs, the authors promote professional hope for “profound possibilities” through understanding, coping, helping and thriving. Bulleted lists and helpful exercises further assist families with identifying the stages of drug abuse, coping mechanisms, modes of self-care, limitations and the importance of positive communication. The book steers family members and supporters away from the trap of codependency yet comforts them in knowing that any ambivalence they may feel is completely normal and is simply the byproduct of life changes. The highlighted case studies clearly personify a wide array of situations of varying severity—e.g., discovering a spouse is a closet alcoholic or finding oneself at the mercy of opioid painkillers or unable to break a cigarette smoking habit. The authors also include a lengthy, significant chapter on treatment options and available levels of care, all stated, as is most of the book’s text, in accessible, everyday language. Objectively written and conveyed with congenial authority, the book offers collective hope to families of substance abusers. Essential outreach on embracing and effectively managing a loved one’s addiction.
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Funk, McKenzie Penguin Press (320 pp.) $27.95 | Jan. 29, 2014 978-1-59420-401-2
A shocking account of how governments and corporations are confronting the crises caused by global warming. After traveling to 24 countries and more than a dozen states and meeting hundreds of people, journalist Funk concluded that “existing [global] imbalances seem only magnified by climate change.” He found major international corporations like Shell and Chevron preparing to invest billions in oil fields made exploitable by retreating Arctic ice. He discovered Wall Street speculators and cashrich countries like China assembling massive plantations in newly liberated Darfur and other African countries in expectation of coming food crises. He documents the international security-driven responses—building walls, using satellites and other forms of surveillance, and setting up detention facilities—to prevent refugees from famine and flooding in the Southern hemisphere from resettling in the wealthier countries of the Northern hemisphere. The author examines three different effects of global warming: melting ice caps and glaciers, droughts and desertification, and floods resulting from rising oceans. As polar ice retreats, new shipping routes and farmland open up. Greenland is set to become “an untapped Gulf of Mexico in the North Atlantic” and is already ranked in the top 20 of countries with oil reserves. In the western United States, Spain, Israel, and parts of Africa and Latin America, desertification and other effects of rising temperatures—e.g., devastating wildfires—are allowing speculators to put a premium on land ownership and acquire water rights in the expectation of future gains. Furthermore, Monsanto and BASF have filed more than 150,000 patents on the seeds of food plants, trying to lock up the genome. Funk contrasts these attempts to profit from global warming with more-orless-feasible engineering approaches to mitigation. A well-written, useful global profile emphasizing concrete solutions rather than ideological abstractions.
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“Goldstein’s bright, ingenious philosophical romp makes Plato not only relevant to our times, but palpably alive.” from plato at the googleplex
LILLIAN HELLMAN An Imperious Life
Gallagher, Dorothy Yale Univ. (184 pp.) $25.00 | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-300-16497-8
In her own memoirs, How I Came into My Inheritance (2001), Gallagher has shown herself to be an incisive, sharpedged, darkly humorous writer, and these qualities help engage readers in a study of Lillian Hellman (1905–1984) that might otherwise seem mean-spirited. The author has no personal ax to grind against her subject, as do many of the sources she quotes, but her portrait is all the more devastating since it seems so matter-of-fact. The best she can say about Hellman is that she was “a conundrum—a person whose determination to prevail in all aspects of her life was often at odds with the persona of moral rectitude she presented to the world.” Her longest success, as a playwright, started with her relationship with Dashiell Hammett and ended with him, leading Gallagher to suggest that on her own, Hellman would not have amounted to nearly as much. Her memoirs, which gave her a literary resurgence, are dissected for untruths and half-truths, usually self-serving. She was an unapologetic Stalinist (as was her lover Hammett) who was either ignorant or uncaring about the realities of the brutal dictator’s rule. “What seems most peculiar in Hellman’s casual misuse of factual truth is her comfort with what might be easily shown to be untrue,” writes Gallagher, using the memory Hellman spun into the highly acclaimed movie Julia (1977) as an example. Gallagher comes closest to admiration in her accounts of Hellman’s promiscuity, which reportedly resulted in at least seven abortions. “She was never very pretty,” writes the author, “and there is no doubt that all her life she suffered from a lack of beauty, although it never seemed to impede her very active sexual life.” Or: “Few beautiful women could equal Hellman’s sexual success; few had her boldness, her presence, her nerve.” Less a conventional biography than a critical appraisal of the subject’s character, career and contradictions—not likely to add any luster to Hellman’s tarnished reputation.
PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away
Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger Pantheon (464 pp.) $29.95 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-307-37819-4 978-0-307-90887-2 e-book
Plato returns to 21st-century America in this witty, inventive, genre-bending work by MacArthur Fellow Goldstein (36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, 2010, etc.). 64
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As the author imagines him, Plato is an intense, curious visitor from ancient Greece who is touring the country to promote his famous tract, The Republic. He lands first in Mountain View, Calif., where he is scheduled to speak to the staff of Google but gets waylaid by an employee who engages him in a conversation about truth, beauty, goodness and justice. That encounter inspires his interest in computers and the intellectual potential of Googling. He comes to love his Google Chromebook, but he cautions Google enthusiasts that information is not the same as knowledge. So what is knowledge? Why is philosophy relevant in contemporary life? What does it mean to live a good life? Those questions and more inform his conversations. Plato joins a panel at the 92nd Street Y to discuss child-rearing, countering the positions of a dour Freudian psychoanalyst and a self-proclaimed Tiger Mom. He takes a gig as a consultant to an advice columnist, offering responses to queries about love and sex; he has a stint on a cable news talk show with an interviewer (think Bill O’Reilly) who questions the whole enterprise of philosophy; and he submits to having his brain scanned in an MRI, even though he’s skeptical about what neurological maps can reveal about the essence of self. Throughout, he never loses his cool, bemused demeanor. Goldstein’s philosophical background serves her impressively in this reconsideration of Plato’s work, and her talent as a fiction writer animates her lively cast of characters: the arrogant, leering scientist in charge of a neurological research lab; the psycho-babbling advice columnist; the egotistical cable news interviewer. Goldstein’s bright, ingenious philosophical romp makes Plato not only relevant to our times, but palpably alive. (Author tour to Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C.)
MENACHEM BEGIN The Battle for Israel’s Soul Gordis, Daniel Schocken (320 pp.) $27.95 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-8052-4312-3 978-0-8052-4313-0 e-book
A life of Menachem Begin (1913– 1992) considers his legacy. With multiple biographies of Begin published in the last 10 years, Gordis (Senior Vice President/Shalem Coll.; The Promise of Israel, 2012, etc.) re-examines the controversial Israeli leader in order “to look at his life through the lens of the passion he still evokes” and to ask, “What was the ‘magic’ of his draw?” Born in Poland, Begin joined the Zionist Betar movement, founded by the charismatic Vladimir Jabotinsky. Serving in a leadership position in that organization, Begin honed his skills as a public speaker and committed himself to two basic ideas: the Jews must have their own state; independence required military strength. In 1939, Begin and his wife fled Poland for Palestine but got only as far as Vilna, Lithuania. There, Begin was arrested by the Soviets; although sentenced to 8 years in a labor camp, he was released after six months, joined the Free Polish Army and was sent as
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a soldier to Palestine. For the next 50 years, Begin was an outspoken, galvanizing and divisive force in Israeli politics. Gordis delineates the fierce controversies within the Zionist communities and focuses especially on the rivalry between Begin and David Ben-Gurion, a battle between Begin’s “romantic preoccupation” with Jewish victimization and Ben-Gurion’s pragmatic belief that Israel needed to move beyond the past. That essential difference resulted in opposing military, political and social strategies. In 1977, after losing eight consecutive elections, Begin finally achieved high office and became, as Gordis puts it, “the most Jewish of Israel’s prime ministers.” His first act was to give asylum to 66 Vietnamese refugees, and he insisted on welcoming Ethiopian Jews. Signing a hard-won peace treaty earned both Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat a Nobel Peace Prize. For Gordis, Begin stands as an exemplary leader whose selflessness and deep loyalty to the Jewish people and to Israel should inspire any who may question “the legitimacy of love for a specific people or devotion to its ancestral homeland.” (16 pages of b/w photos)
DOUBLE DOWN
Halperin, Mark; Heilemann, John Penguin Press (512 pp.) $29.95 | Nov. 5, 2013 978-1-59420-440-1 Gossipy insider’s account of the presidential election of 2012, the sequel to Halperin and Heilemann’s best-selling Game Change (2009). Time senior political analyst Halperin and New York national affairs editor Heilemann, who both serve as senior political analysts at MSNBC as well, are respected and connected in the media and political worlds and well-sourced at the upper reaches of the Democratic and Republican parties. Not surprisingly, their views are conventional and close to the center, their attention trained on politics as sport (or, as the title suggests, as a high-stakes poker game) and politicians as personalities. Their focus is always on the candidates with the most buzz among not just voters, but the Washington, D.C., cognoscenti. In the Republican primaries, then, former ambassador to China Jon Huntsman—a relatively moderate former governor of Utah whom the Obama administration picked for his knowledge of Chinese, to earn points for bipartisanship and possibly to take out of the running for 2012—warrants an entire chapter, though he made almost no impression at all outside of the Beltway. On the other hand, Ron Paul, who lasted until the Republican National Convention and arguably altered the ideology of the grass-roots Republican party more than any other candidate, including the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, is dismissed for his “kookiness,” which “made him more likely to end up on a park bench feeding stale bread to the squirrels than become the Republican nominee.” Still, Halperin and Heilemann offer a highly entertaining, dishy read, full of astonishing revelations about the strengths and, most intriguingly, the foibles of the |
nation’s political stars and egos, including unforgettable portraits of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in particular. “[W]e have tried,” write the authors, “to render the narrative with an unrelenting focus on the candidates and those closest to them—with an eye toward the high human drama behind the curtain.” Like crack for political junkies.
HEIMLICH’S MANEUVERS My Seventy Years of Lifesaving Innovation
Heimlich, Henry J. Prometheus Books (230 pp.) $19.95 paper | $12.99 e-book Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-61614-849-2 978-1-61614-850-8 e-book
A self-promoting memoir from the inventor of the abdominal thrust technique that bears his name. A retired thoracic surgeon, Heimlich launches into his prideful narrative by relating how he faced and overcame antiSemitism early in his career; how, as a 21-year-old camp counselor, he saved the life of a man trapped in a train wreck; and how, as a young medical officer in the U.S. Navy, he saved the sight of many Chinese soldiers by medicating their eyes with a concoction he invented. Some years after the war, Heimlich, working with dogs, developed a reverse gastric tube procedure that replaced or bypassed the esophagus, thus enabling patients with damaged ones to swallow. Later, he designed a drainage mechanism with a flutter valve that prevented fluids or air from returning to the chest after surgery and an unobtrusive oxygen delivery device for patients with breathing problems. His best known achievement, however, is the Heimlich maneuver, a simple emergency technique that forces air out of the lungs of a choking person, enabling an object lodged in the airway to be expelled. This technique, writes the author, is also effective for treating asthma and victims of drowning. His ideas have not been universally accepted, and he is still battling with the Red Cross over its recommendation to first try back slaps on choking victims. Heimlich’s claim that malariotherapy (injections of malaria-infected blood) can be an effective treatment of HIV/ AIDS patients has also met with opposition. Heimlich’s plainly written memoir, replete with pictures of himself and anecdotes featuring him with grateful patients, is not just a personal story but a sharp criticism of a medical system that he sees as too slow to accept or at least research controversial new ideas. A rather grandiose self-assessment that may appeal to someone whose life has been saved by the Heimlich maneuver—not likely to reach a wider readership.
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INTERVIEWS & PROFILES
Erez Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michel The Data Wizards Reveal Who We Are in Uncharted By Gregory McNamee Photo courtesy Eliza Grinnell
Merry Christmas. It’s long been said that the phrase owes to Charles Dickens—more specifically, to the Charles Dickens of A Christmas Carol, a short novel serialized in 1843. A few sources claim that Dickens coined the phrase, others merely that he popularized it. It’s the kind of thing that lexicographers live for, the kind of thing that fuels rarified research that would require decades of reading and a slew of grants, library support and assistants. Or, failing that, a quick visit to the computer and the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which tells us that “Merry Christmas” came along in about 1800, spiked in the 1830s, dropped to almost nothing, rose again in the mid1840s, and then steadily climbed in popularity, beating the stuffing out of its closest competitor, “Happy Christmas.” There’s meaning to be drawn from those numbers: first, in establishing that Dickens didn’t coin it, second, in suggesting that he may very well have popularized it and third, in proving once again that you can’t count on received wisdom for much of anything. A second example: Eminent historians have mainPhoto courtesy Bret Hartman
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tained for decades that before the Civil War, Americans referred to the United States as a plural entity: “The United States are a nation devoted to liberty.” Come the Civil War and Union victory, and, presto, Americans referred to the country in the singular: “The United States is a nation devoted to liberty.” Received wisdom, once again—and, as Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel point out in their new book, Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, not so. Instead, they note, the transition from the singular to the plural “was gradual, starting in the 1810s and continuing into the 1980s—a span of more than a century and a half.” It’s the “big data”—a term that itself, Google’s Ngram Viewer tells us, has been spiking in usage for the last 20 years—of Aiden and Michel’s subtitle that sheds light on such matters, data that in this case is derived from a robotic look at the vast corpus of words, all 500 billion or so of them, that Google has been assembling through, among other vehicles, its on-again, off-again, controversial program of scanning whole libraries into digital form. “There are no complex equations here,” data-science entrepreneur Michel tells Kirkus. “When it comes down to it, it’s simple: We’re counting words.” The term “big data” has a bit of Big Brother about it in a time when the National Security Administration, it seems, knows more about us than we do. But, says geneticist Aiden, big data “is incredibly democratizing. There’s a first-person adventure story possible in big data, where a student can approach a very big question in very simple ways and make big discoveries.” Adds Michel, “This is especially true of bodies of data that are way too large to go through by hand”— among them the thousands of books that the Ngram Viewer sorts through to answer questions about the
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prevalence of phrases such as “the United States is” and “Merry Christmas.” Recalls Michel—who, like Aiden, is in his early 30s and therefore too young to remember much of the world without computers—a few years ago, the two gave a presentation at a library conference in which they talked about how to use Ngrams to interrogate vast bodies of data. It was the first time, in fact, that what would become the Ngram Viewer (now available at http://books.google.com/ngrams) was shown outside Google proper. “Librarians are supposed to be pretty quiet,” he says, “but at the end of the talk, after we showed our results, we asked if there were any queries. They went wild. They were yelling over each other: Try ‘pirates’! Try ‘ninja’! Try ‘vampires’! They were a raucous bunch.” Adds Aiden, “In the early searches, there were lots of swear words, too.” It’s easy enough to try for yourself, as I did, testing “ninja.” It’s said that Ian Fleming introduced the Japanese term into English in one of his James Bond novels, You Only Live Twice. He didn’t, and though Ngram doesn’t quite have the power yet to home in on the very first appearance of the term (for that we’ll have to scan billions more words into the corpus, a project on which thorny copyright issues still ride), what it does show is that sure enough, after 1964, when Fleming’s book appeared, the term becomes steadily more common, rising to its current everyday status in our culture. Swear words and vampires aside, Aiden, who is now on the faculty of the Baylor College of Medicine, recalls talking with a couple of dermatologists who had made discoveries about several obscure medical conditions simply by asking the right Ngram questions. The doctors were probably very good at their work, but they were also not trained in the arts of Boolean logic or the fine details of search-engine syntax. Instead, they were ordinary people making use of data that was meaningful to them—another instance, the authors note, of the democratizing possibilities of big data made freely available. “The earliest optical lenses helped us look into the cosmos and ask questions about the biology of organisms,” says Aiden. “The lens in itself is a pretty simple device, but it can do cool stuff. In the same way, the big data lens we’re talking about here is pretty simple, but it allows us to ask really meaningful questions about ourselves. We can repartition all kinds of research. Ordinary people without vast amounts of training can ask exciting questions. I bet that in 20 |
years, there will be hundreds of major breakthroughs in our knowledge—and that half of them will have been pulled off by teenagers.” “We hope that, with our book, our contribution is about the possibility that anyone can have a big data adventure,” Aiden adds. “And we hope that our readers will feel energized in knowing that we now have measurement tools that allow us to look at things that we could never have imagined measuring before.” How many times “Merry Christmas” appeared in books before 1843 is just a start, and Uncharted makes for a fine user’s manual in a discipline that we have only just begun to explore.
Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor at Kirkus Reviews.
Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture Aiden, Erez; Michel, Jean-Baptiste Riverhead (256 pp.) $27.95 | Dec. 26, 2013 978-1-59448-745-3 kirkus.com
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SMARTER The New Science of Building Brain Power Hurley, Dan Hudson Street/Penguin (304 pp.) $25.95 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-1-59463-127-6
A journalist’s account of the young science of brain training. “Are smart phones the only thing we can make smarter?” asks Hurley in this debut, an expansion of a 2012 article in the New York Times Magazine. In fact, he reports, more than 60 studies show that cognitive training substantially improves the intellectual abilities of humans. The first such evidence was presented in 2008 by Swiss researchers Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, who found college students who played a computerized game called the N-back for 20 minutes per day, five days per week for four weeks improved their fluid intelligence—the underlying ability to learn—by 40 percent. Despite lopsided evidence in favor of training effectiveness, many scientists continue to dispute whether the gains are real. In this conversational book, Hurley examines the research, describes heated debates at major science meetings, and chronicles his use of what he considers the most credible cognitive interventions to see whether he can improve his own intelligence. He explores several commercially available programs with “plausible claims of effectiveness”: Cogmed, whose computerized training helps individuals with ADHD; Lumosity, whose games are used to treat cognitive issues in patients with cancer and other diseases; Posit Science, which trains people with Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury; and LearningRX, which uses playing cards and other materials. Hurley notes that violent video games—much used in the military—also improve a person’s speed, accuracy and visual attention. From these and other known cognition enhancers, he creates a personal program of grow-smarter activities and treatments, including N-back, Lumosity, physical exercise, learning a musical instrument and wearing a nicotine patch. After three and a half months of training, for two to three hours daily, tests show his fluid intelligence increased by 16 percent. A highly accessible report on cutting-edge science with practical tips for readers bent on boosting their own intelligence.
MAD AS HELL The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies Itzkoff, Dave Times/Henry Holt (304 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-0-8050-9569-2
Compellingly told story of the making and cultural effect of the 1976 Hollywood satire of the TV industry. 68
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Best known for the signature rant (“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”) of its tragic antihero Howard Beale, Network appeared at a moment when paranoia went mainstream in American movies. (The film competed for audience and awards that year with such other dark crowd pleasers as Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men and Marathon Man.) New York Times culture reporter Itzkoff (Cocaine’s Son: A Memoir, 2011, etc.) naturally keeps his eye most closely on auteur Paddy Chayefsky, an irascible brick house of a man from the Bronx who won fame with his proletarian love story Marty (1955) and a reputation for stubborn insistence on fidelity to his scripts. The author shows how the idea developed over lunchtime conversations with Chayefsky’s close friends, including the choreographer Bob Fosse and playwright Herb Gardner, how he researched it by observing the NBC newsroom in action, and how he labored over the language in his starkly utilitarian office in midtown Manhattan. Itzkoff also zooms in on Chayefsky’s supporting players as they joined the project: the easygoing workhorse Sidney Lumet in the director’s chair; former Hollywood golden boy gone slightly to seed William Holden, hired to play the adulterous and conscience-stricken news director Max Schumacher; the notoriously “difficult” Faye Dunaway as ratings-crazy programming director Diana Christensen; and Peter Finch, who eagerly left retirement to lobby for the role of Beale. A solid behind-the-scenes movie book. While fans of the film will find the book irresistible, others may be less convinced by Itzkoff’s case for Network’s prescience and cultural significance, supported though it may be by the opinions of Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper and others in the news industry. (15-20 b/w photos in 8-page insert)
THE SILVER LINING A Supportive and Insightful Guide to Breast Cancer
Jacobs, Hollye Photos by Messina, Elizabeth Atria (288 pp.) $29.99 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-1-4767-4371-4
A two-year ordeal with breast cancer conveyed with frank prose and stunning
photography. A Southern California–based palliative care nurse, Jacobs’ blog, The Silver Pen, evolved into an online diary immortalizing her thoughts and feelings after a grim diagnosis in 2010. Originally begun as a way to avoid personal interaction yet still update concerned friends, the blog went viral. It also reiterated the hard truth that cancer is an equal-opportunity affliction, since the author considered herself a “healthy, happy, vegan-eating, marathon-running thirty-nine-year-old with no family history of breast cancer.” As a caregiver and social worker, Jacobs unexpectedly found herself “on the opposite side of the bed,” and her candid chronicle doesn’t spare or sugarcoat the details about how blindsiding cancer proved to be, with numerous
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biopsies, surgeries, grueling chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and their attendant side effects. Jacobs’ narrative voice is firm, gently authoritative, yet comfortably good-natured as she addresses the challenges of delivering the news to children, post-treatment reintroduction to everyday life, vital nutrition advice, and the unlimited virtues of having levelheaded, supportive friends and family throughout the process. Her compassionate guidebook—something Jacobs admits she longed for during her own treatment—provides perhaps the most important advice in sections called “Practical Matters,” which address key clinical details about managing the entire patient experience. Award-winning photographer Messina beautifully captures the essence of Jacobs’ journey, delivering mood and emotion through gorgeous imagery. Throughout it all, Jacobs remained resilient, buoyed by a holistic approach to wellness. This is a wise investment for women newly diagnosed with breast cancer or simply interested in how the process works. Unfailingly optimistic, Jacobs compassionately offers proof positive that even a terrifying, arduous disease like cancer can have a silver lining. A dignified, intensely personal journey of survival.
I AM THAT GIRL How to Speak Your Truth, Discover Your Purpose, and #bethatgirl
Jones, Alexis Evolve Publishing (312 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-9893222-8-7 978-0-9882245-7-5 e-book
Debut memoir/self-help book designed to empower the women of Generation Y to discover and pursue their passions. Jones found her calling to inspire girls while starring in Eve Ensler’s feminist play The Vagina Monologues. A former contestant on Survivor, the author believes that “everything and everywhere is a stage,” and she launched her nonprofit organization, I Am That Girl, to give girls a community to belong to that also reinforces what she says on stage and through social media. Her book offers simple but thorough advice for female readers on how to become their true selves. Jones’ close friend Sophia Bush offers a gushing, enthusiastic foreword to the text, which is interspersed with personal revelations from other successful women, along with inspiration quotations from figures such as Kofi Annan and Harriet Tubman. “I owe it to myself to be remarkable,” Jones quips, “so I am.” Beautiful and poised, Jones fully embraces herself while admitting to her flaws and mistakes. She nudges readers toward the same level of self-acceptance through a variety of methods that range from self-care habits (exercise, healthful eating) to keeping a journal, being responsible for recognizing your feelings, voicing your needs, taking risks and embracing all of life with fearlessness. While many of the author’s suggestions are stale or cliché, on the whole, her writing avoids coming across as vapid or condescending due to its accepting, funny and relatable |
tone. Girls grappling with one or more of the issues covered here may find solace and support in these pages, and that’s largely a credit to the book’s many short, first-person accounts from women who have faced and, in some cases, are still facing similar struggles with relationships, work and self-confidence. Encouraging and authentic.
THE UPSIDE OF DOWN Why the Rise of the Rest Is Good for the West
Kenny, Charles Basic (240 pp.) $26.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-465-06473-1
If you want to know how the rise of China is affecting your daily life, check the beer cooler. Thirty years ago, writes World Bank senior economist Kenny (Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding—And How We Can Improve the World Even More, 2011), beer consumption in China was pretty well nonexistent. Today, China “consumes more than 40 billion liters,” plenty more than is consumed in the United States. Does that mean that the Chinese are stealing our suds or that brewers are ignoring the American market? Not at all: By Kenny’s lights, illuminating his overarching thesis on the positives of development, “beer provides [a] global opportunity for Western brands from Guinness to Schlitz.” Faced with declining markets for consumer goods of various sorts in the satiated West, Western concerns can thrive anew with the expansion of markets abroad—not just in China, but in India, Latin America, Africa and everywhere in the developing world, which is acquiring the wherewithal to bring abundance to its people. A moralist might cringe, but to Kenny, this is generally a good thing, not only since innovation will flow from such markets, but also due to the fact that it will help integrate the world economy even further. Arguing against “declinist” views of the West, the author claims that the lifting-all-boats model is largely correct, and if the go-go growth models of the past are likely not to govern the future economy, at least some growth will be possible, an unlikely scenario in an isolationist West with a declining and aging population. The rise of the rest will affect the rest in that sense, too, Kenny writes, since even if “real demand for migration is lower than stated demand,” there is still need for skilled workers from abroad to move to America, leading to the continuing internationalization and diversification of American society. An optimistic view of the future economy—refreshing in that sense, but perhaps a touch too rosy, even if written with the dry detachment of an economist.
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SPIRIT RISING My Life, My Music
Kidjo, Angélique with Wenrick, Rachel Harper Design (256 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-06-207179-8 A Grammy Award–winning Beninese singer/songwriter’s heartfelt memoir, coauthored by Wenrick, about her life as a musician and human rights activist. Kidjo began her career in entertainment at age 6, when her mother pushed her onto a theater stage and told the little girl to sing. Terrified, the author quickly overcame her fears and realized that she had arrived “home.” The singer began performing with her older brothers and immersing herself in music not only from Benin, but also Togo, France and the United States. Her great artistic awakening came a few years later after she heard Miriam Makeba singing on the radio. The legendary South African singer’s “magical [and] uplifting” voice inspired the young Kidjo to become “just like her.” After high school, Kidjo became a popular solo performer in both Benin and neighboring Togo, but her growing fame also brought her and her family under the scrutiny of an increasingly totalitarian Beninese government. At 23, she fled to Paris, where her path eventually led her to le CIM, the school for jazz. Kidjo pursued her interests in fusions that merged jazz, which fellow students told her “[wasn’t] for Africans,” with traditional African lyrics and rhythms. Her artistic boldness caught the attention of Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, who had discovered such world music icons as Bob Marley and U2. Like most of Blackwell’s protégées, Kidjo also achieved international recognition. Yet it was only after she began doing humanitarian work in Africa for UNICEF that she was finally able to act on her long-standing need to give back to a land that had “given [her] so much.” Richly illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs, Kidjo’s work celebrates one woman’s courage to use her musical gift “to empower people all over the world.” Warm, lively and compassionate. (125 illustrations)
SURVIVAL OF THE NICEST How Altruism Made Us Human and Why It Pays to Get Along
Klein, Stefan The Experiment (272 pp.) $24.95 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-61519-090-4
A middling look at some of the better angels of our nature by German science writer Klein (Leonardo’s Legacy: How Da Vinci Reimagined the World, 2010, etc.). We owe to scientist W.D. Hamilton the philosophically rich observation that altruism might have arisen as a function of natural selection by widening our sense of who is kin to us 70
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to include people beyond our immediate gene pool—i.e., we help do our bit to ensure the survival of the species. Klein takes a little of the biological edge off Hamilton’s aperçu by writing of “the impulses that lead us to seek our own happiness in the happiness of others,” impulses that would sometimes seem to contradict our rotten record at being chimps with guns. Some of Klein’s statements verge on hyperbolic: Do most of us really make “selfless choices dozens of times every day”? Perhaps so, if we include holding the door open for someone or leaving a tip for the wait staff. Happily, Klein brings the often overlooked work of Pyotr Kropotkin into the discussion; the Russian anarchist prince argued against the sometimes-Hobbesian view of Darwin by asserting that members of species committed acts of mutual aid as much as they competed with each other, Ayn Rand and her lot notwithstanding. Granted that some of Klein’s characters are contrarians—John von Neumann, founder of game theory and model for Doctor Strangelove, famously insisted that there was nothing wrong with America’s bombing the Soviet Union before the Russians could bomb us—he does a good job of bringing current science into view, from psychology and biology to economics. Even so, the argument seems a little diffuse and soft and would have benefited from more rigor in place of bromides such as “selflessness makes us happy and transforms the world.” Tougher-minded readers will prefer Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and even Prince Kropotkin himself.
AN ATHEIST’S HISTORY OF BELIEF Understanding Our Most Extraordinary Invention
Kneale, Matthew Counterpoint (256 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-61902-235-5
An atheistic novelist temporarily abandons his fiction to examine the roots and history of belief. Love them or hate them, the atheist intelligentsia, led by people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, have always loved to court controversy. Their analysis is often accusatory, their tone overt and their flogging of controversy laden with political agenda. Strange, then, to run across this nonbeliever, Kneale (When We Were Romans, 2008, etc.), who takes such an overwhelmingly polite look at religious history that there’s little to rage about. This isn’t by any means a personal journey; while the author gives a mild introduction to himself as the son of a Methodist atheist and a refugee German Jewish atheist, he doesn’t paint the history of faith with a personal patina. Instead, he methodically examines the development of specific aspects of faith through historical events, ancient texts and the commonality of the human condition. While it begins with primordial religions and touches on variants like the ancient Mayans, the book eventually lands squarely in the Mideast. However, it’s not
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exactly a traditional takedown of a generic Christianity. Kneale touches on a range of faiths including Hinduism, Judaism, Islam and Scientology. Various chapters find the author seeking out the roots for the invention of a Christian heaven, prophecies of the end of the world, and the unkind ends of heretics and witches. The ultimate answer the author seems to find is that religions are created out of that fundamental fear of being a human being, all alone and afraid of the dark. “So I suspect there will be a few more invented worldviews,” he writes. “What fears will they answer? This will depend on us. It will depend on how safe our world feels.” An intellectually interesting comparison in the same way that comparative histories of revolutions are interesting; there’s blood and passion in all that madness, but it doesn’t always land on the page.
GOT THAT SOMETHING! How the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” Changed Everything
Kozinn, Allan Byliner (70 pp.) $2.99 e-book | Nov. 12, 2013
A well-researched book by an author who has devoted decades to writing about the Beatles, but their breakthrough American hit can’t bear the symbolic
weight of the subtitle. If “I Want to Hold Your Hand” hadn’t “changed everything,” another Beatle hit soon would have. As has often been noted, the explosion of Beatlemania across the United States occurred shortly after the Kennedy assassination, as if a nation in mourning were somehow recapturing its innocence, so it’s no surprise that books commemorating the 50th anniversary of each would proliferate. A New York Times cultural reporter and former classical critic, Kozinn (The Beatles: From the Cavern to the Rooftop, 1995) functions here more like a scholarly researcher than a reporter or pop critic, providing plenty of information about the context, the history, the recording equipment and producer George Martin (one of the few primary sources in the text). The hit song was a watershed for the band in America, but it was just one of a string in England, and it was in fact a transitional effort for the band, who soon dropped it from their live performances and made it sound merely cute in light of their rapid musical maturation. As the author acknowledges, “If ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was a wolf whistle disguised as a bouquet of daisies, it was also the last time that Lennon and McCartney wrote with the teenage market in mind. It soon became clear that they no longer had to.” So, what “changed everything?” The recording was the Beatles and producer George Martin’s first with a fourtrack tape machine, which allowed more options beyond capturing a performance and would soon lead to more tracks, more overdubbing and more options. It was the right hit at the right time with the right (for its time) technology. Those most interested in the book’s minutiae will be rabid fans who already know much of it. |
SEX AFTER... Women Share How Intimacy Changes as Life Changes
Krasnow, Iris Gotham Books (272 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 10, 2014 978-1-59240-827-6
Journalist Krasnow (The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes to Stay Married, 2011, etc.) shares the skinny on women’s sex lives. The author chronicles her interviews with more than 150 subjects, mostly women, in an effort to explore the role of sex in their lives today. They range in age from 30-somethings adults to women nearing 90. These days, with marriage and raising a family often postponed until the 30s, the romance of dating is becoming obsolete. Single 20-somethings are increasingly embracing the casual hookup culture found on college campuses. The romantic intimacies of marriage yield to the stress of the early stages of parenting, frequently exacerbated by postpartum depression and exhaustion. Some of the author’s interviewees report being gratified by the new sexual norms, which allow them to initiate sexual encounters even though these are not always satisfying. However, Dr. Justin Garcia, an assistant professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University, warns that hookups frequently involve alcohol and drugs and can leave women vulnerable to assault. Krasnow discusses how to deal with other strains on intimacy, including later-life problems such as divorce or death, the search for a new partner, or a man who is addicted to sex with the assistance of Viagra. “There is no gold standard sexual relationship to which women must aspire toward,” writes the author. “[W]ho we love and how we love is ultimately the definition of our humanity.” Still, the author devotes much of the book to the joys of uninhibited, exploratory sex with or without romantic frills. The erotic overtones in the interviews and the author’s own commentary are intended to encourage anything-goes sexual exploration—accepting the inevitable failures and treasuring the carnal highs. A nuanced, revelatory account of the role of sexual freedom in modern intimacy.
UNLEASHING THE SECOND AMERICAN CENTURY Four Forces for Economic Dominance
Kurtzman, Joel PublicAffairs (304 pp.) $27.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-61039-309-6
Fasten your seat belts. If Kurtzman (Startups that Work: Surprising Research on What Makes or Breaks a New Company, 2005, etc.) is right, the American economy is fueled for an unprecedented takeoff into a new era of economic growth.
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“What could have been a silly exposé of Paris, hypnotism and detection is instead a well-constructed, informative work by a talented author.” from little demon in the city of light
The author, former editor in chief of both Harvard Business Review and Strategy + Business, has little patience for the “doomsayers” and the “doomsday preppers” born of political negativity. Though he agrees that fearmongering is not a crime, he sets out to reassert America’s immense strengths and bright future. Kurtzman assumes that the fuel for the coming economic surge will be provided by four transformational forces: 1) the continuing strengths of the country’s manufacturing sector (still the world’s largest and most productive); 2) the rapid approach of energy self-sufficiency; 3) the accumulation of around $5 trillion in the bank accounts of corporations and reserves of the banking system; 4) the promising future of collaboration among government, university research and the private sector (this may be the most intriguing to many readers). Kurtzman takes readers on a tour through the multiple world-class medical-research institutions that have set up shop in Boston, companies that exemplify how pioneering advances in medicine and medical technology are being made at a rapid rate. For decades, the author argues, America’s manufacturing and economic strengths have been based on advanced research and the development of a strong educational infrastructure—e.g., Boston-based MIT. Now, that tripartite collaboration is producing a new generation of technology based on robotics, much of which will begin to nullify the cost advantage of outsourced labor. “For the United States, the future looks bright,” writes Kurtzman. “The country has abundant new sources of energy, high levels of creativity, the world’s largest manufacturing base—which is getting larger— and enough private capital to turn anyone’s plan into reality.” Great booster writing offering many exciting possibilities for America’s future.
LITTLE DEMON IN THE CITY OF LIGHT A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris Levingston, Steven Doubleday (352 pp.) $26.95 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-385-53603-5
International journalist and Washington Post nonfiction book editor Levingston (Historic Ships of San Francisco, 1984) uses the story of a murder by a foolish girl and her lover to illustrate another side of belle epoque Paris. The author foregoes the tabloid excesses and exploitation of lurid details from that time and focuses on the debate as to whether a person is capable of committing a crime under hypnosis or even post-hypnotic suggestion. The supposedly duped 20-yearold girl, Gabrielle Bompard, and her lover, Michel Eyraud, lured a wealthy Parisian to her room, where Eyraud strangled him. They then stuffed him in a trunk and took it to Lyon, where Eyraud dumped the body over an embankment toward a river. Unfortunately for the lovers, the body landed against a bush, where the odor of decomposition soon revealed its location. The talent of 72
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Marie-François Goron, chief detective of the national police, “a stout bundle of energy…with a thick mustache that he waxed at the tips,” is the most interesting part of the story. His doggedness in exploring every clue and hunch led to the discovery of not only the victim’s body, but also the identities of the perpetrators. Finding and arresting Bompard and Eyraud proved to be a more daunting challenge. Ultimately, it’s unclear whether Goron would ever have found them, since Bompard deserted Eyraud in California and returned to Paris with a new lover who convinced her to go to the police. With worldwide press, her lover was soon taken, and the two were tried together. Bompard believed that no one could ever blame her and relished her fame as the newspapers of the time reveled in sensationalistic reporting. What could have been a silly exposé of Paris, hypnotism and detection is instead a well-constructed, informative work by a talented author.
HUNDRED DAYS The Campaign that Ended World War I Lloyd, Nick Basic (384 pp.) $29.99 | Feb. 3, 2014 978-0-465-07492-1
Many more books describe World War I’s beginning than its end, so readers will welcome this engrossing history covering Allied offensives from July 1918 to the German surrender in November. Lloyd (Defense Studies/Kings Coll. London; The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day, 2011, etc.) disagrees with the traditional portrayal of World War I as a series of bloody offensives launched by dimwitted generals who failed to learn from their mistakes. In reality, they paid close attention. By 1918, Allied commanders—Alexander Haig, Philippe Pétain and John Pershing of the British, French and American armies—could take advantage of technological progress and bitter experience. Furthermore, tanks and aircraft were available in far greater numbers, and advances in artillery increased accuracy and made it unnecessary to “register” every gun by dropping a few shells on the enemy, thus warning of an attack. Previous debacles, from Ypres to the Somme to Passchendaele, taught that it was impossible to sustain an offensive no matter how successful since artillery and transport bogged down in the torn-up, muddy battlefield. It was far better to halt when progress slowed and enemy resistance was increasing and attack elsewhere. Lloyd describes how they proceeded with detailed descriptions of a dozen immense, half-forgotten offensives (Amiens, St. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne) that, despite often horrendous casualties, pushed back an increasingly exhausted and demoralized enemy. The author emphasizes that both the German economy and its army were on the verge of collapse at the armistice, but since Allied forces were still beyond the frontiers, die-hard enemies, including Hitler, could claim that Germany’s army was not defeated but rather betrayed from within.
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A fine account of the Allies’ dramatic but ultimately unsatisfying victory in World War I. (illustrations; 9 maps)
PARIS LETTERS
MacLeod, Janice Sourcebooks (272 pp.) $14.99 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4022-8879-1 The story of an advertising copywriter in California who found love in Paris and turned letter writing into art. After a decade writing the sort of junk mail inserts that usually go directly from post box to garbage can, Canadian author MacLeod (co-author: The Dating Repair Kit: How to Have a Fabulous Love Life, 2007, etc.) was nearing burnout. At age 34, single and lonely, she was clinging to the middle management rung at a corporate advertising agency instead of pursing her dream of traveling and creating art. In a memoir that also serves as a self-help guide, she recounts how her journey out of cubicle-land began with a single question: “How much money does it take to quit your job?” Her answer proved deceptively simple: save or not spend $100 per day for a year. With her belongings whittled down to one suitcase and a small set of watercolors, she set off for Europe. At her first stop in Paris, she flirted with a butcher who looked like actor Daniel Craig. His English was as poor as her French, but of course, love speaks a universal language. Other stops on her tour included Edinburgh and Rome before she discovered how to finance more time with her James Bond in Paris. Inspired by the framed painted letters by the English artist Percy Kelly on the walls of her cousin’s cottage in Yorkshire, she opened an online shop to sell personalized letters with drawings of her own travels. Several are included in the book and serve as inspiration for others longing for adventure. Borrowing a technique from her former advertising career, MacLeod provides a list of 100 tips to plot your own escape. A romantic romp from Santa Monica to Paris with loads of advice on how to live minimally and take risks in life and love.
THE LOST ART OF FEEDING KIDS What Italy Taught Me About Why Children Need Real Food
Marshall, Jeannie Beacon (240 pp.) $24.95 | $24.95 e-book | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-8070-3299-2 978-0-8070-3300-5 e-book
Teaching kids “to learn the simple pleasures of the table and to appreciate the taste of real food.” The childhood obesity epidemic gets a fair amount of coverage in the American press, often with a slant on how unhealthy |
eating leaves us less competitive in the global marketplace. The eating habits abroad have shifted as well, however; as American exports of fast food, convenience foods and cooking shortcuts have seeped into other cultures, the health effects have slowly emerged. Journalist Marshall and her husband moved to Italy in the early 2000s and immersed themselves in the food culture. Childless, they were free to indulge in the authentic cuisine of their new home. When the author gave birth to their first child, the family’s shopping needs shifted to include an extra mouth to feed. Marshall began to perceive a subtle change—at first slight, with parent-peers still working to incorporate classical traditions in their cooking, but increasingly toward convenience foods as her son started school. The author explores the changes in eating on both a macro and micro level—how global economics has shifted the priority for simple carbohydrates into regions and countries with their own storied cultures and patterns of eating, based off generations of cuisine built around locally produced foods. Marshall also examines the public relations machine that offers a solution for harried mothers and fathers who go into parenting with the best of intentions but find their resolve eroded by a constant message from the food industry to buy cereal bars, crackers, cookies and yogurt and feel satisfied about it—maybe it’s organic or doesn’t contain high-fructose corn syrup, and it’s “packed with nutrients.” Marshall’s clear, direct book ably captures the frustrations of trying to find the healthiest path and inspiring kids to do the same.
THE BOOK OF MEN Eighty Writers on How to Be a Man
McCann, Colum; Cabot, Tyler; Consiglio, Lisa—Eds. Picador (288 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 5, 2013 978-1-250-04776-2
A collection of 80 pieces on the essence and challenges of manhood that almost reads like a literary parody of self-
help books. According to the introduction, the book commemorates the 80th anniversary of Esquire, a magazine that “has always sought to instruct.” Here, the instruction concerns “what it means to be a man and how to live up to that responsibility.” The project is a collaboration between the magazine and Narrative 4, which attempts to “connect people and communities everywhere through the sharing of stories,” and the collection’s contents were curated by novelist McCann (TransAtlantic, 2013, etc.), a co-founder of Narrative 4 and Esquire contributor, along with editors from each. The pieces span much of the globe, crossing gender lines (some of the best are from women, some of whom don’t seem to treat manhood as seriously as many men do), featuring journalists, novelists and a few nonwriterly ringers (actor Gabriel Byrne, songwriter-producer Joe Henry). There is plenty of violence and copious amounts of tears, and there is sex that is usually more an expression of power, however twisted,
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than of romantic love. Some of the shortest are some of the best, such as this two-sentence contribution by Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid: “What did it even mean, walk like a man? Still, Omar was in enough pain to take off his makeup and start trying.” There’s a provocative piece of reportage on a transgendered performer by novelist Michael Cunningham, which ends with the question, “Men. I mean, what are we anyway?” There’s also an instructional piece by Vanessa Manko that initially seems to be about sex—“It is done with the body, not with the mind. She should feel when you begin to move and if she precipitates the wrong direction, you’ve done something wrong”—but is really about the tango (which is really about sex). None of the pieces are titled, and many blur the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. A mixed bag. Each piece is intended to respond to “an essential question: What is a man?” but the answers remain elusive.
I FORGOT TO REMEMBER A Memoir of Amnesia Meck, Su with de Visé, Daniel Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $25.00 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4516-8581-7
Meck cobbles together fragments of her life after a traumatic brain injury. Living with her husband, Jim, and their two toddler boys in Texas, the author’s life changed dramatically in 1988 when a ceiling fan fell on her head. She passed out, and the paramedic’s penlight showed one dilated pupil, one shrunk, and no response to pricks to her fingers and toes. Meck slipped into a coma, and the family prepared for her passing, but she pulled through. However, she had full loss of her episodic memory (recollections of specific events from one’s lived experience) and a good portion of her semantic memory (the recollection of facts; she had about a 100-word vocabulary and was confounded by a fork), and her procedural memory was about as developed as a reptile’s. Meck’s narrative, written with the assistance of award-winning journalist de Visé, moves forward in fits and starts; for years, she lived in a hazy world, unable to read (she learned along with her sons), falling out of chairs, suffering bouts of dizziness and blackouts, and forgetting faces almost instantaneously, including her husband’s and children’s. She tried in vain to mimic other peoples’ actions, and she could not discern the function of a hairbrush or how a drinking cup works. Meck relates these tortured years of slowly gathering herself together, then dropping a step or two back, with an unmodulated inflection. She was baffled by routine, feigned comprehension, was pained by sex—though she did have the saving grace of a fast blossoming of love between mother and children. There has been progress on many fronts, she writes, but most days are still a struggle. “Part of me realizes that I will never really know exactly what I was like before my head injury,” she writes, “but another part of me stubbornly refuses to give up as I try desperately to fit pieces together in an ever-changing life-size puzzle.” A hopeful and heart-gladdening memoir. 74
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BREATHLESS An American Girl in Paris Miller, Nancy K. Seal Press (224 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 5, 2013 978-1-58005-488-1
A coming-of-age tale covering the author’s 20s in Paris, where she studied, worked, lived on her own for the first time, fell in and out of love, and found solid ground beneath her feet. Miller (English and Comparative Literature/Graduate Center, CUNY; What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, 2011, etc.) has previously mined her past in memoirs about herself and the lives of her parents. This book takes its name from the Godard film, which inspired the author, upon graduating from Barnard College in 1961, to move to Paris at 21. While studying at the Sorbonne, Miller sought freedom from her parents’ incessant meddling and attempted to swap her “nice-Jewish-girl” identity for a life of sophistication and romance. She writes of her transformation from wide-eyed naif (“I didn’t set out to sleep with Philippe”) to a confident, individualized woman capable of making her own decisions—about whom to date, where to live and work, and the direction of her future. Repeatedly, she revisits her perceived lack of self-understanding and the myriad experiences that informed her self-awareness and capacity to recognize and give voice to her own desires. Miller’s first year in France truly represented a necessary break from the lifelong pressures of “les parents terribles,” and it was followed by more space after she received a Fulbright teaching fellowship, enabling her to stay longer. After a couple years, Miller met and eloped with an older American expat who ran a language school. The book’s final half is dominated by the marriage’s highs and lows, the latter of which contributed even more fully to Miller’s break from controlling influences and resulted in her trusting her own judgment. Originally in search of salvation from her family, Miller found the external adventures she’d craved and painful ones she hadn’t anticipated, and she went through a deeply personal transformation. Articulate, keen and satisfying.
SHARDS A Young Vice Cop Fights the Darkest Case of Meth Addiction—Her Own
Moore, Allison; Woodruff, Nancy Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $24.99 | Apr. 22, 2014 978-1-4516-9635-6
An honest, introspective account of a vice cop’s methamphetamine addiction. Written with the assistance of writing instructor and novelist Woodruff (My Wife’s Affair, 2010, etc.), Moore’s harrowing account begins at the lowest point of the author’s life. Plunged into the depths of her addiction,
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“A doggedly researched and fulsomely argued biography.” from journey to the sun
the despair and fear are palpable as she chronicles her frantic attempt to commit suicide. “I’m living in hell and I can’t even die,” she writes. Moore then spins the narrative back in time to fill in her story before her addiction and near death. Before her first snort, the author was an innocent blonde island transplant, having moved from New Mexico to Hawaii. A waitress looking to finally put down roots, she applied to the Maui Police Department on a whim and was shocked when she was accepted. Once she became part of the department, Moore’s hard work and dedication set her apart, and she began working on drug cases on her own in a feverishly idealistic dream to rid the islands of the scourge of meth. Then a series of emotional drains left her feeling like she couldn’t cope, and the circumstances of her job left her with a small amount of meth in her hands. The spiral that comes next may be predictable, but it feels fresh in Moore’s telling, and the outcome is no less terrifying. “The meth gave me a false sense of reality,” she writes, “masking the truth and keeping me alive until it almost killed me.” Somehow, knowing that the author survived to tell her story doesn’t offer any comfort or allay fear for her well-being. This effect can only be attributed to the strong writing, with Woodruff helping to bring the story to life. An addition to the world of addiction literature worth reading, full of grim reality that thankfully never crosses the line into gratuitous territory.
JOURNEY TO THE SUN Junípero Serra’s Dream and the Founding of California Orfalea, Gregory Scribner (384 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-1-4516-4272-8
A California story becomes an American story: the prolix, passionate resurrection of the largely forgotten Spanish Franciscan priest who founded the early missions along the California coast. With the Spanish church’s incursions into the Baja peninsula and what is now California in the mid-18th century, the game was over for the Native Americans who inhabited the region. The Spanish, while ostensibly bringing the civilizing word as they moved in, and more lenient masters than the English, French or Americans, nonetheless wrought the fatal three-pronged scourge of “guns, germs and steel.” Arab-American writer Orfalea (Creative Nonfiction/Pitzer Coll.; The Man Who Guarded the Bomb: Stories, 2010, etc.) believes the work of native Mallorcan priest Junípero Serra (1713–1784) deserves a reappraisal. During the half century of Spanish rule in California, when Serra set out to start a series of missions from San Diego to San Buenaventura, the Indians were more “incorporated rather than eliminated.” According to this sympathetic portrait of the well-meaning though flawed priest, Serra had certainly learned from the past mistakes of Old World missionaries like the Jesuits. Spain was worried about Russian imperial |
infiltration into the New World, as well as the threat of uprisings among Indians, and Serra and his missionary forces were ordered to move northward. He seemed genuinely to have believed the naked savages he encountered in Baja in 1769 were “before sin,” a people of equal status with the Spanish. Orfalea sifts carefully through the record of pre-contact versus postcontact—e.g., after early initial success in founding several missions, Serra had to contend with violence by the accompanying Spanish soldiers, and he encouraged intermarriage between the Spaniards and Indians as a way to mitigate tension. A doggedly researched and fulsomely argued biography.
THE BOMBERS AND THE BOMBED Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945
Overy, Richard Viking (592 pp.) $36.00 | Feb. 24, 2014 978-0-670-02515-2
Historians still argue over how much, if at all, strategic bombing contributed to defeating Hitler. This magisterial overview will not end the debate, but it skillfully illuminates all sides. Demonstrating his exhaustive research, Overy (History/ Univ. of Exeter; 1939: Countdown to War, 2011) begins the first chapter, “Bombing Bulgaria,” with a description of a destructive campaign that undermined the pro-German government, which managed to persist until the Soviet army arrived. Few readers will ignore the lesson. Throughout World War II, British Bomber command believed that it could devastate the warmaking capacities of the Nazis. Within months, losses forced a switch to nighttime bombing, which made accuracy nearly impossible. Overy delivers an insightful analysis of how all nations reversed their abhorrence of killing civilians when it became unavoidable. The British were not taking revenge for the Blitz; their conversion had already occurred. The United States assumed its more heavily armed bombers (with lesser payloads) could defend themselves during the day and hit targets precisely. Both beliefs proved wrong, but America stuck to daylight bombing despite terrible losses. Both nations exaggerated the damage that their bombers caused, but good evidence exists that a major effort against Nazi oil production caused crippling shortages during 1944 and 1945. Overy provides an eye-opening and often distressing account of the bombing of Europe’s occupied nations, whose defenses were far less prepared than Germany’s. More bombs fell on France and Italy than England. “The moral response to bombing and being bombed was historically complex and sometimes surprising,” writes the author. Readers looking for dramatic accounts of specific bombing missions should read a selection of books by British military historian Martin Middlebrook. For a far more expansive view that includes those on the receiving end, Overy is the choice.
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GOOD TIDINGS AND GREAT JOY Protecting the Heart of Christmas
Palin, Sarah Broadside Books/HarperCollins (256 pp.) $22.99 | Nov. 12, 2013 978-0-06-229288-9 The former Alaska governor searches for the culprit leeching the joy out of Christian Christmas. Palin (America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, 2010, etc.) calls foul on the incremental disintegration of the Yuletide season by those who seek to reinvent the holiday by removing the religious element and replacing it with what she calls a “secular winter festival, which launches on Black Friday and ends sometime after Kwanzaa.” The outspoken conservative points the finger at American atheists offended by religious crosses and the presentation of Nativity scenes, the latter of which she proudly advocated for in her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska. Palin’s ruffled feathers are due in large part to the corporatization of Christmas, particularly the attempts of big-box retailers to strip the holiday of its holy name and heavily religious connotations. As she dissects these injustices, Palin offers scenarios and examples in hopes that readers will make their own decisions about what to do when confronted with these same issues. The author also shares seasonal anecdotes and family photographs of her life in Alaska during the holiday season—e.g., playing Christmas morning Eskimo Bingo, “a gift-swapping game and the only time we enthusiastically encourage the kids to be greedy.” Of course, this is Palin’s turf, so these nostalgic, family-friendly memories are often accompanied by the obligatory backhanded jab, as when she describes gifting husband Todd with a powerful new firearm one year “to combat the anti-gun chatter coming from Washington.” The author tritely dismisses the media altogether and shows great dismay toward a nation increasingly rethinking its religious allegiances. At the very least, Palin is very occasionally entertaining as she displays her conservative convictions across the diminutive pages of this stylishly produced book, which concludes with a chapter of traditional family sweet and savory recipes. A stocking stuffer for Palin fans.
ONE WAY OUT The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band
Paul, Alan St. Martin’s (416 pp.) $29.99 | $14.99 e-book | Feb. 18, 2014 978-1-250-04049-7 978-1-4668-3586-3 e-book
“I have viewed everything with the eyes and ears of a journalist but the heart and soul of a fan,” writes Guitar World senior writer Paul (Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, 76
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and Becoming a Star in Beijing, 2011), who spent decades and hundreds of interviews earning the trust of musicians who didn’t always trust each other. “The Allman Brothers Band, I believe, has no equal.” One need not share the author’s belief in the band’s supremacy to find its story engrossing. The majority of the book takes the form of oral history, which on other projects might sometimes seem slapdash and lazy but here proves crucial, for there are so many different perspectives—on everything from the band’s name to leadership and songwriting credits—that having dozens of different voices serves readers well. Nobody disagrees on the overwhelming talent, inspiration and legacy of guitarist Duane Allman, who formed the band, saw it coalesce into something special, and died recklessly and young before the music reached its popular peak. Explains one fellow musician, “Duane died just on the downstroke of the diving board, as the band was about to launch.” The loss of Duane and founding bassist Berry Oakley a year later would have brought an end to a less determined band, but the ABB somehow flourished despite a leadership void and decades of tensions exacerbated by drugs and alcohol. Perhaps the most complex relationship was between Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts, as the former was never considered an equal partner with his brother, and the latter resented the implications of the band’s name as he attempted to fill the guitar void and rule more by dictatorship than the universal respect Duane commanded. In the wake of Betts’ departure and Gregg’s sobriety, the responsibility has largely shifted to a new generation of guitarists, as the band improbably boasts its strongest dynamic since its original leader’s death. The author doesn’t pull punches, but all involved should find it fair as well as comprehensive. (Photos throughout. First printing of 100,000)
SHOWTIME Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s
Pearlman, Jeff Gotham Books (496 pp.) $30.00 | Mar. 4, 2014 978-1-59240-755-2
The sports-journalist author of Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton (2011) returns with a tough-love look at the NBA team that won five championships in the 1980s. The author begins with an awkward interview with former Lakers’ coach Jack McKinney—whom Pearlman and others credit for the Lakers’ fast-breaking, showtime style—a man whose 1979 bicycle injury caused serious cognitive and memory problems that led to his dismissal. (Pearlman returns 70 pages later for a fuller treatment.) The author then moves forward chronologically, pausing continually to sketch both the darkness and lightness in the biography of the person under his lens at the moment. We learn details about owner Jerry Buss; general manager (and former star) Jerry West; players Kareem
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Abdul-Jabbar, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Michael Cooper, Kurt Rambis, James Worthy, Byron Scott and others; coaches Paul Westhead, Pat Riley and Mike Dunleavy. Although Pearlman recognizes the obvious athletic supremacy of these players and the domination of the team, he delivers a number of blows to the throats of some of his principals—noting, especially, the voracious sexual appetites of Buss and Magic Johnson and others. He tells us that Abdul-Jabbar hated white people and complains that he continued playing far too long. He slams both Westhead and Riley for considering themselves unassailable coaching geniuses. We see how Johnson made personnel—and even coaching—decisions, on and off the court, and we view the bitterness and jealousy of some of the players. Readers will be unsurprised when Pearlman focuses now and then on the Larry Bird–Magic Johnson relationship and the on-court enmity of the Lakers and Celtics. Some significant games receive sumptuous detail, and the author ends with Johnson’s announcement in 1991 that he was HIV-positive. Pearlman ably demonstrates how deeply flawed human beings can nonetheless create a near-flawless beauty on the court.
SOCIAL PHYSICS How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science
Pentland, Alex Penguin Press (320 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 3, 2014 978-1-59420-565-1
Pentland (Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World, 2008, etc.)—the director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory who was named “one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world”—attempts to justify large-scale monitoring of individual behavior. The author claims that collecting large amounts of personal data reveals how social networks can be engineered to operate most effectively in “our new hyperconnected world.” Hidden patterns of behavior become clear by assembling and analyzing massive amounts of data. He and his associates have pioneered the development of digital monitoring devices that record faceto-face and online social networking. His first venture into what he calls “reality mining” began 15 years ago, with the “world’s first cyborg collective in which everyone lived and worked with wirelessly connected computers on their bodies and computer displays in their glasses.” Currently, the author is studying how “the flow of ideas and information, [translates] into changes in behavior” in a corporate setting. “Measurements are made by collecting digital bread crumbs such as the sensors from cell phones, postings on social media, purchases with credit cards, and more.” Volunteers from corporations participating in the program wear “a sociometric [identity] badge” and carry smartphones that closely monitor their behaviors—e.g., the times and locations of their social interactions, phone calls and emails, as well as the number, times and places of job-related interactions. |
By analyzing this data and observing the social dynamic in smallgroup meetings, Pentland demonstrates how social networking can be used to boost the collective intelligence of a group open to testing new ideas, if it is not suppressed by a hierarchical corporate structure. Though the author recognizes the threat to privacy implicit in such monitoring when it is not voluntary, “the potential rewards of…a data-driven society,” he writes, “are worth the effort and the risk.” A fascinating view of the future of social networks that offers intriguing possibilities but also the potential of a dystopia greater than that portrayed by George Orwell in 1984.
PIGS CAN’T SWIM A Memoir
Peppe, Helen Da Capo/Perseus (288 pp.) $22.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-306-82272-8
A writer and photographer’s wry but poignant account of her hardscrabble childhood and adolescence in rural New England. Peppe grew up on an isolated Maine farm the youngest child of nine. Her housewife mother left school after eighth grade, and her exArmy father worked as the fix-it man for the local post office. They struggled to keep afloat financially, yet pride kept them from admitting they were anything but middle class. In their chaotic household, the eldest children occupied themselves with smoking, drinking, fighting and sex. Peppe only added to the furor with her penchant for asking questions that her harried parents could never answer, like whether or not it was “sad for live chickens to see [them] plucking the dead ones.” To everyone in her family, Peppe became “queer.” She was the little girl whose deep sympathy for animals and inability to see the ones she loved get slaughtered for food drove her to become a vegetarian. She escaped the harshness of her environment by seeking the companionship of animals, especially dogs and horses. Peppe also immersed herself in books by British veterinarian James Herriot and, later, fellow Mainer Stephen King, whose terrifying fictional worlds “seemed so much safer than [her] own reality.” By the time she entered high school, she had survived not only the taunts and coldness of her family, but also sexual assault. Peppe began dating a pastor’s pianist son who looked “a bit like a chimpanzee” but played like he belonged at Juilliard. Parental disapproval and a miscarriage at age 16 only served to strengthen the bond between Peppe and the boy, who became her future husband. Unsentimental in its character portrayals and forthright yet humorous in its depiction of devastated innocence and family dysfunction, Peppe’s book is a celebration of difference, resilience and the healing power of love.
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PHIL JACKSON Lord of the Rings
Richmond, Peter Blue Rider Press (352 pp.) $27.95 | Dec. 26, 2013 978-0-399-15870-4 Richmond (Badasses: The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden’s Oakland Raiders, 2010, etc.) examines how the legendary coach’s search for spiritual truths may have served as the blueprint for his future coaching success. By NBA standards, Jackson was an eccentric. In college, he majored in philosophy, psychology and religion, and he stood apart from his New York Knicks teammates as he referenced Camus and Sartre in interviews with beat reporters. His enlightenment extended throughout his adult life and NBA tenure. Richmond studies Jackson’s entire career, including his seasons coaching the Albany Patroons of the Continental Basketball Association, a section that comprises too much of the book. He recounts Jackson’s well-known penchant for giving his NBA players reading assignments in an effort to familiarize them with his ideologies and help the 12 dissimilar individuals “coalesce and win.” It is worth noting that although Jackson won a record-breaking 11 championship titles with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, he was named NBA coach of the year only once. Ironically, this may be due to his peers’ opinion that his success was not due to his coaching ability; rather, he was lucky to coach superstar players and work alongside equally skilled general managers who created those teams. Ultimately, Richmond strains to represent Jackson’s coaching methods as an outgrowth of his personal value system, particularly when he posits that Jackson’s famed “triangle offense”—something of a free-form strategy that creates flow within the game and becomes instinctive—mirrors the three components of Buddhist philosophy, as well as Jackson’s spiritual belief system, comprised of Christian, Zen and Buddhist doctrines. The book would have been more engaging as an oral history, weaving together stories and observations from Jackson’s colleagues, teammates and friends. The narrative ends with the author no closer to validating his premise that Jackson’s “Zen thing” has been the key to his success.
UNBALANCED The Codependency of America and China
Roach, Stephen Yale Univ. (344 pp.) $32.50 | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-300-18717-5
Eye-opening look at a condition that wanders from the boardroom to the psychiatrist’s couch: financial codependency, which enables the worst qualities of two powerful economies. 78
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It’s no secret that much of America’s consumer culture is predicated on the availability of cheap goods from China. Neither is it a secret that China has grown wealthy in large measure because Americans are willing to go into debt to buy such cheap things. The news that Roach, former chairman and chief economist of Morgan Stanley Asia, brings in this book is how deep that relationship extends and how quickly it has enriched one nation and impoverished another. Meanwhile, the United States keeps spending, and China keeps saving, both in ways that endanger the health of their domestic economies. The solution is obvious: Roach proposes a “rebalancing prescription… grounded in the economic imperatives facing both nations— pro-consumption in the case of China, and pro-savings in the case of the United States.” Obvious, yes—but possible? Perhaps not, given how deeply ingrained the habit of saving is in Chinese households and given that “personal consumption is the essence of the American Dream,” one that Americans don’t like to be told is detrimental in excess. Roach’s arguments are complex and data-packed, and it helps to have some grounding in economics in order to appreciate such matters as how Ben Bernanke, in his role as chairman of the Federal Reserve, helped keep the U.S. economy afloat during the crisis of 2007–2009 (“Bernanke…laid out a menu of unconventional choices that a zero-bound-constrained central bank might also consider as part of a quantitative stimulus package”). Even without such background, readers will not mistake the urgency with which Roach approaches his subject—which promises economic meltdown if our bad habits are not lessened. Full of implication, well-written and of much interest, especially to fiscal policy wonks.
THE DEPTHS The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic Rottenberg, Jonathan Basic (272 pp.) $26.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-465-02221-2
A call for a new “diagnostic and therapeutic” paradigm for treating depression by framing it as a mood disorder rather than a disease. Rottenberg (Psychology/Univ. of South Florida; co-editor: Emotion and Psychopathology: Bridging Affective and Clinical Science, 2007) calls attention to the epidemic increase of depression—not only in America, but also in England, Canada and Italy. With more than 15 percent of the population affected by depression, he writes, it is threatening to become “a preeminent public health menace.” Despite the massive resources devoted to research and treatment of the disease, “it is striking people at younger and younger ages.” Drawing on his own experience as director of the USF Mood and Emotion Laboratory and as someone who himself underwent a multiyear bout of deep depression, he points to disappointing progress in the development of effective antidepressants over the past 60 years, when
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the rate of recurrence is factored in. The author explains that mood serves an evolutionary function that we share with other mammals; it helps to tune behavior “to situational requirements” in ways that we are mostly unaware of. From an evolutionary perspective, an ordinary sad mood “makes people more deliberate, skeptical and careful in how they process information from their environment.” In Rottenberg’s opinion, our cultural emphasis on being upbeat can be counterproductive. The human capacity for reflection can derail this semiautomatic process when we seek to enhance pleasurable upbeat moods and worry about being depressed. By shifting our attention to our own mental processes, we risk losing sight of broader goals. Rottenberg does not dismiss the benefits of talk therapy and medications to treat depression or deny the role of genetic predisposition. His laudable aim is to broaden the discussion. An important contribution to his stated aim of promoting “an adult national conversation about depression.” (17 b/w figures)
THE BEATLES ARE HERE! 50 Years After the Band Arrived in America, Writers, Musicians & Other Fans Remember
Rowlands, Penelope—Ed. Algonquin (288 pp.) $15.95 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-61620-350-4
Journalist and critic Rowlands (Paris Was Ours, 2011, etc.) delivers a collection of light-as-a-feather remembrances of the Beatles’ British invasion. This latest round of idol worship is mostly harmless to the rose-colored memories of Beatles fans. The author cribs an out-of-context quote by John Lennon about a “scrapbook of madness” to describe it. However, this collection is vexing in its seesawing arc among screaming tweens who remain steadfast Paul-worshipping Beatlemaniacs at 64 and beyond, all-too-clever New York intelligentsia defending careers built on iconoclasm, and the occasional superfluous blurb from the likes of Cyndi Lauper or Billy Joel (these latter bits are so bland they would be completely at home in any tribute issue of Rolling Stone). The book takes its roots from a 1964 Gay Talese article in the New York Times, “Beatles and Fans Meet Social Set.” The accompanying photograph finds a screaming Rowlands at the center of the madness, flanked by identical fans, clutching a sign that reads “BEATLES PLEASE STAY HERE 4-EVER.” In other entries, the author tracks down the photographer and even the other girls in the photo, but it’s hard to say why these are important developments. Others are beyond superfluous. An email from the novelist Phillip Lopate simply reads, “Thanks for the offer, I’m flattered, but honestly, the Beatles had no impact on me at the time.” It’s telling when a book that is meant to be a nostalgic look back at a different time in America is punctuated by an acidic anecdote from the novelist Fran Lebowitz during which she recalls being at a party where Sir Paul |
was playing the piano. Her reaction? “Hey, I’m trying to talk here.” Other contributors include Joe Queenan, Greil Marcus, Peter Ames Carlin, Pico Iyer and Barbara Ehrenreich. A bonbon for fans but a legacy better served by more substantive journalism.
THE RIGHT PATH From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics—and Can Again
Scarborough, Joe Random House (224 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 12, 2013 978-0-8129-9614-2
Bromides from Morning Joe host and former Republican Congressman Scarborough (The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservatism and America’s Promise, 2009, etc.) on the restoration of the good old GOP. Whether the reader actually wants that restoration—and Scarborough assures us that it is inevitable: “I know that will happen”—depends on whether he or she agrees that Ronald Reagan was a demigod. Scarborough seems to think so, even as he brings Dwight Eisenhower back into the ranks of trueblue conservatives. (Should that be true-red conservatives?) By Scarborough’s account, the GOP went astray in its steady march toward ideological purity in the post-Reagan years, forsaking the big-tent approach that Eisenhower espoused for a mean-spirited politics of “grievance and resentment.” In the past, writes the author, purity over practicality led to the neardamnation of the GOP to “complete political irrelevance”— just witness the years in the wilderness following the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Scarborough argues that Richard Nixon’s middle-ground, silent-majority approach was the better one, adding that even Goldwater came around to embracing the wisdom of compromise. Yet, for anyone who remembers the breathtaking revelations of the Nixon tapes, it is curious for the author to suggest that Nixon and his successor, Reagan, did not appeal to “racial resentments”; both surely did, just as surely as the Republican right does today, supplied with Gingrich-ian code words (say “urban,” not “black”). Not that Gingrich is a hero of the Reagan mold by Scarborough’s view, any more than was Mitt Romney (“a flip-flopping moderate who offended conservatives as well as swing voters”). Well-meaning, though the coming electoral cycle will show whether the GOP abandons the gladiatorial politics of resentment and, per Scarborough, actually makes some effort to show that it can govern.
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“Although some pieces are slight, on the whole, reading Schwartz is like a pleasurable visit with a thoughtful and articulate friend.” from this is where we came in
THIS IS WHERE WE CAME IN Intimate Glimpses
Schwartz, Lynne Sharon Counterpoint (272 pp.) $26.00 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-61902-246-1
A literary New Yorker shares her memories. Novelist, poet and essayist Schwartz (Two-Part Inventions: A Novel, 2012, etc.) has gathered mostly previously published pieces on subjects ranging from childhood memories to taking an African drumming class to listening to Anthony Powell’s books on tape. Many are essays of self-discovery, efforts to dig “for the shards of…early delusions” and the sources of her easily incited anger, competitiveness and impatience. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s and ’50s, Schwartz and her friends spent long Saturday afternoons at the movies, usually arriving in the middle of a feature. They watched, not certain about the plot until they saw it through at the next showing, leaving whenever they could say for certainty, “I think this is where we came in.” The reader undergoes a similar process in fitting together disparate “glimpses” into a full portrait. One essay focuses on the author’s cherished baby grand piano, an extravagant purchase by her parents, that she has moved wherever she has lived; another, on the quality of her parents’ marriage and its hidden intimacies. She reflects on the nature of friendship, on her youthful belief in humankind’s essential goodness, and on her knee-jerk response to blame someone or something for malevolence. “Blaming was a comfort,” she writes, “and comfort was high on our scale of values….If villains could be found to blame for everything, then evil could be localized and kept in check, like an epidemic.” The idea of evil permeates her recollection of a shattering visit to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were held during apartheid. Two of the strongest essays focus on recent events: heart surgery to replace a valve, which generated months of severe depression; and her delicate parsing of love for a grandchild. Although some pieces are slight, on the whole, reading Schwartz is like a pleasurable visit with a thoughtful and articulate friend.
A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY
Sebald, W.G. Translated by Catling, Jo Random House (240 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-4000-6771-8
The late German novelist’s essays of appreciation for writers and artists whose influences pervade his work. The last book published by Sebald receives its first English translation, after it was issued in Europe in 1998. American readers will likely find it illuminating for its insight into the author’s work and its 80
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obsessions, themes, and observations on home and exile. When he writes, in his essay on Rousseau, how “one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable,” it’s plain that this writer is also writing about himself. The longest, most ambitious and revelatory essay is subtitled “A Remembrance of Robert Walser,” who was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, died institutionalized, and was little-known or -read when he was alive: “The traces that Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint to have almost been effaced altogether.” Yet Sebald’s critical resurrection will likely spark the reader’s interest in an author “who almost always wrote the same thing and yet never repeated himself ” and who felt that “he was always writing the same novel, from one prose work to the next—a novel which, he says, one could describe as ‘a much chopped-up or disremembered Book of Myself.’ ” (Walter Benjamin remarked that the characters in Walser’s fiction came “from insanity and nowhere else.”) Contemplating the work of others, Sebald writes from a writer’s rather than a reader’s perspective, of one who shares the affliction, who recognizes that, as he writes of painter Jan Peter Tripp, “beneath the surface of illusion there lurks a terrifying abyss. It is, so to speak, the metaphysical underside of reality, its dark inner lining.” This last word from the novelist provides a nice footnote on his own writing.
BOTH SIDES NOW A True Story of Love, Loss and Bold Living Sharp, Nancy Books & Books Press (320 pp.) $16.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-9839378-6-9
A blogger and speechwriter’s debut memoir about losing her young husband to cancer and the struggle to rebuild her life. Sharp’s marriage to her beloved first husband, Brett, seemed all but inevitable. Both “had grown up in neighboring towns with both parents still together and mutual friends of all ages.” But when Brett was diagnosed with brain cancer just three years later, the pair faced the defining challenge of their marriage. He survived chemotherapy and went into remission, but radiation caused permanent baldness, a case of severe neuropathy and other health issues. Both decided to start a family despite the pall of uncertainty that the cancer had spread over their lives, and in vitro fertilization allowed Sharp to become pregnant with twins. However, within days of giving birth, they learned that Brett’s cancer had returned. For two and a half years, Sharp was brutally squeezed between managing new motherhood and caring for a rapidly declining spouse. Eventually, Brett succumbed to the disease, and healing from a death that had taken place over seven of their 11 years of marriage proved extremely difficult. Sharp had to deal with her own grief as well as that of two small, frightened children, who could not understand that their father was never coming back again. The author moved
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to Denver, where she responded to a magazine ad from a man who had lost his own wife to cancer and was himself the father of two teenage sons. Through dating, and eventually marrying, a widower with experiences so like her own, and then learning how to live in a blended family, Sharp came to her most powerful realization: While it would never be possible to completely “balance the scales” after a loss of the kind she suffered, she could still rededicate herself to living life to the fullest. Wrenching yet eloquent and fiercely hopeful.
THE ADVENTURES OF HENRY THOREAU A Young Man’s Unlikely Path to Walden Pond Sims, Michael Bloomsbury (384 pp.) $27.00 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-1-62040-195-8
Delving into the observations of people around Thoreau, such as family, other transcendentalists and townspeople, as well as the famed writer’s works, Sims (The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic, 2011, etc.) aims to flesh out this uniquely American genius. An ecstatic observer of nature, an admirer of the Native American ways, practical builder and idiot savant, Thoreau was both a local boy schooled in the marvels of the natural scenery of the Concord River and a Harvard-educated scholar; he was erudite yet mocked for his homespun ways. With parents who seemed to have been extremely understanding of their son’s unconventional proclivities—his father had made a good living manufacturing pencils; his mother was a vocal opponent to slavery—young Thoreau tried his hand at teaching, like his other siblings, but quit due to the fact that he could not whip the children. Tramping about with his beloved older brother, John, Thoreau also grew more intimate with the “calm and lyrical revolutionary,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had moved into Concord with his wife and family in 1835 and suggested that the young freethinker keep a journal. While Emerson had a profound effect on Thoreau, the younger man also touched the poet as having “as free & erect a mind as any I have ever met.” Their deepening understanding encouraged Emerson’s other protégés, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, to overcome their initial criticism of Thoreau’s uncouthness, and his generous mentor allowed Thoreau to live in his home and even build a shack on his newly purchased acres around Walden Pond, where Thoreau would reside for two-plus years. Building his chapters with deliberate, sometimes-tertiary detail, Sims creates a sensuous natural environment in which to appreciate his subject, as the “quirky but talented young man named Henry evolve[d] into an original and insightful writer named Thoreau.” Ably directs readers back to the primary works of Thoreau and his contemporaries.
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THE LIMITS OF PARTNERSHIP U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century Stent, Angela E. Princeton Univ. (336 pp.) $35.00 | Jan. 19, 2014 978-0-691-15297-4
Whatever happened to the end of the Cold War? According to Stent (Government and Foreign Service/Georgetown Univ.; Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, the Soviet Collapse, and the New Europe, 1998, etc.), since the collapse of the Soviet Union barely 20 years ago, there have been four “resets” in relations. George H.W. Bush was wary but optimistic, Bill Clinton welcoming, George W. Bush ambivalent and Barack Obama—well, just a touch frosty, at least in some measure due to Vladimir Putin’s return to power. Why, Stent wonders, “has it been so difficult to develop a productive and more predictable post–Cold War U.S.–Russian partnership”? Her lucid book is an extended answer to that pointed question. Part of the problem is Russia’s unwillingness to become a second-tier power, and, as Stent notes, the nation’s GDP has in fact grown sevenfold since 2000, largely due to oil and gas exports. Couple that with the fact that Russia has few material needs for which it requires America’s participation to meet, and it becomes more difficult to exert any sort of economic control. Meanwhile, many Russians have regarded the period following the Soviet collapse not as a harbinger of peace and prosperity but as a shameful tumble into irrelevancy and disorder, something to be avoided in the future. George W. Bush’s fateful assertion that he could look inside Putin’s soul aside, what is clear from Stent’s book is that it is in the self-interest of the U.S. to develop friendlier ties with Russia, even as tensions continue to pull the nations apart—most recently, the kerfuffle over Edward Snowden, who has found safe harbor of a kind in Moscow thanks to “the lack of an extradition treaty,” something a security-conscious administration might want to remedy. Academic but readable, and sometimes surprising, as when Stent reminds readers that Putin offered important information just before 9/11 that went ignored.
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“An exhaustive—and exhausting—chronicle of the champ’s boxing career and disastrous life.” from undisputed truth
CONFESSIONS OF A MEDIOCRE WIDOW Or, How I Lost My Husband and My Sanity
Tidd, Catherine Sourcebooks (320 pp.) $14.99 paper | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-4022-8522-6
“I spent my eleventh wedding anniversary planning my husband’s funeral.” So begins Tidd’s emotional memoir of coping with life after becoming a single mother with three children at the age of 31. One of the greatest innovations of the Internet age is how it has facilitated people connecting with other people who have similar interests. One example is the online support group; no matter the nature of support required, there’s likely an online group focused on that need. The author discovered this when, one summer morning in 2007, her husband was injured in a traffic accident; as his condition went from bad to worse, she had to make the decision to let him die. Heartbroken and in uncharted waters, Tidd turned to the Internet and began sharing her story with others. The “Widdahood” website was born, and she became a national speaker on grief, coping strategies and the benefits of organ donation. This book is an extension of these efforts, but the author goes farther and creates a narrative out of her struggles with coping, managing the affairs following her husband’s death, and finding new ways to look at old beliefs. Few stones are left unturned: Tidd found herself the target of judgments about the grieving process, and despite multiple resources designed to support her, she was often confused and lost. At the end of the book, the author also provides tips for supporters of widows and widowers on such topics as memorializing, coping, setting milestones, dating, moving forward and “What to Say (and What Not to Say) After Loss” (don’t say: “This was part of God’s plan” or “I know how you feel”). Tidd combines indignation and sarcasm with humility, and the result is a moving, helpful look at how to navigate the difficult times that come with tremendous loss.
UNDISPUTED TRUTH
Tyson, Mike with Sloman, Larry Blue Rider Press (592 pp.) $30.00 | Nov. 12, 2013 978-0-399-16128-5 An exhaustive—and exhausting— chronicle of the champ’s boxing career and disastrous life. Tyson was dealt an unforgiving hand as a child, raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in a “horrific, tough and gruesome” environment populated by “loud, aggressive” people who “smelled like raw sewage.” A first-grade dropout with several break-ins under his belt by age 7, his formal education resumed when he was 82
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placed in juvenile detention at age 11, but the lesson he learned at home was to do absolutely anything to survive. Two years later, his career path was set when he met legendary boxing trainer Cus D’Amato. However, Tyson’s temperament never changed; if anything, it hardened when he took on the persona of Iron Mike, a merciless and savage fighter who became undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. By his own admission, he was an “arrogant sociopath” in and out of the ring, and he never reconciled his thuggish childhood with his adult self—nor did he try. He still partied with pimps, drug addicts and hustlers, and he was determined to feed all of his vices and fuel several drug addictions at the cost of his freedom (he recounts his well-documented incarcerations), sanity and children. Yet throughout this time, he remained a voracious reader, and he compares himself to Clovis and Charlemagne and references Camus, Sartre, Mao Zedong and Nietzsche’s “Overman” in casual conversation. Tyson is a slumdog philosopher whose insatiable appetites have ruined his life many times over. He remains self-loathing and pitiable, and his tone throughout the book is sardonic, exasperated and indignant, his language consistently crude. The book, co-authored by Sloman (co-author: Makeup to Breakup: My Life In and Out of Kiss, 2012, etc.), reads like his journal; he updated it after reading the galleys and added “A Postscript to the Epilogue” as well. At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.
THE EDUCATION OF GEORGE WASHINGTON The Forgotten Book that Shaped the Character of a Hero
Washington, Austin Regnery History (364 pp.) $29.95 | Feb. 10, 2014 978-1-62157-205-3
As the great-nephew of the first president, Washington writes about a forgotten book he claims molded the Founding Father’s personality: H. de Luzancy’s A Panegyrick to the Memory of His Grace Frederick, Late Duke of Schonberg (1690). The author deems it absolutely necessary that all Americans change their ways and become more like his great-uncle, ignoring the passage of more than 200 years of social, political and economic changes that have altered the need and/or usefulness of such a person. He does acknowledge modernity with comparisons that suit no purpose and make no point. This book seems to be Washington’s bully pulpit (his conclusion: “If you trust in Providence, follow your conscience, and keep an eye on the past to guide you,” he writes, “while you keep another eye on your goals, then you, too, can be good and great, just like George Washington”), and the narrative is loaded with witless asides and lazy writing (“What. A. Cool. Job.”; “I mean, it’s not for everyone, maybe, but, hey…”; “Hold on to your tri-cornered hats”) without which readers could possibly take him seriously.
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At the end of the book, the author briefly mentions that next to the Bible on Washington’s bedside was Addison’s Cato, which was staged at Valley Forge and from which he quoted as early as 1758. Cato, the virtuous republican who opposed Caesar’s tyranny, undoubtedly had a great deal more influence on the general than did Duke Frederick. This book is much more a venue for the author’s ultraconservative views—e.g., “stupid, baconloving Canadians”; “haughty contempt…a French specialty”; and especially, “the ignorant, stupid people who believe [in] the rule of Demos, the Mob.” For a picture of strict belief in class distinctions and the stupidity of the fools who accede to the good of the whole, please step this way. For anyone else, take a pass.
THE AGE OF ATHEISTS How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God
Watson, Peter Simon & Schuster (512 pp.) $35.00 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-1-4767-5431-4
Journalist and intellectual historian Watson (The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New, 2012, etc.) analyzes what people have done to supplant or supplement religion since Nietzsche declared the death of God in the late 19th century. The author begins with the horror of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie (religion out of control) and returns to Rushdie some 500 pages later. In between is a rich mixture of cultural, intellectual, political and religious history that demands much of readers and is in ways a multilayered chronicle of the past 140 years. But a basic question underlies all: What do we do without God? Watson looks initially at the effects Nietzsche had on the arts (Thomas Mann and Isadora Duncan write and dance through this section) and then looks at American thinkers including Emerson William James, John Dewey and George Santayana. Poets and artists of various stripes also figure prominently (Rimbaud, Cézanne, Bergson), and Freud makes an early appearance as well (he returns periodically). Playwrights are next (Strindberg, Shaw, Chekhov most prominently) before he devotes a chapter to the impressionist painters and their successors. In a solid chapter about the power of desire, a topic to which he returns, Watson explores the works of Gide, Henry James, Wells and Proust. And on the author goes, moving seamlessly from literature to art, philosophy, psychology, political movements, world war, drama and popular culture (the Doors, Dylan, etc.). Watson blasts the world’s religions for their failures during the Holocaust, but he doesn’t have a lot to say about music (a little bit about Charlie Parker and bebop). He delivers a sturdy chapter on the works of today’s scientific atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Pinker) and ends with praise and analysis of Ronald Dworkin. An erudite opus demanding substantial patience, intelligence and education from its readers. |
SELF-HELP MESSIAH Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America
Watts, Steven Other Press (576 pp.) $29.95 | Oct. 29, 2013 978-1-59051-502-0
Watts (Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream, 2008, etc.) recounts the life and times of motivational guru Dale Carnegie (1888–1955). The author goes beyond simple biography to explore the seachange in American thought heralded by the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), examining the social, technological and economic upheaval of the early 20th century that shifted emphasis from the idea of “character” to “personality,” a more individual-centered focus made possible by unprecedented opportunities for prosperity. Carnegie—born Carnagey—the shrewd author may have sought to align himself in the public mind with successful industrialist Andrew, no relation—grew up in poverty on a farm in Missouri, baffled by the failure of his parents’ devotion to Protestant and Victorian ideals of hard work, self-denial and moral rectitude to reap the rewards of material success. Carnegie undertook a number of professions—successfully, in the case of selling meat products, less so in the fields of journalism, acting and fiction writing—before finding great success as a public speaker preaching the gospel of personal reinvention, positive thinking and the importance of cultivating relationship skills. His classic manual on the subject was an instant, massive hit, a revolutionary distillation of Carnegie’s principals that continues to sell in significant numbers today and essentially inaugurated the still thriving genre of self-help. Watts portrays Carnegie not as a wildly original thinker or electrifying guru figure but rather as an easygoing, avuncular, self-deprecating (he long maintained a file entitled “Damned Fool Things I Have Done”) man, a brilliant synthesizer of ideas from psychology, philosophy, advertising and his own experience. He was an intuitive savant who grasped the nature of his changing times and crafted a message that resonated with a mass culture struggling to adapt. A fascinating portrait of the father of self-help and incisive analysis of the mercurial era that produced him.
INSIDE A PEARL My Years in Paris
White, Edmund Bloomsbury (272 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-60819-582-4
A memoir that engages on a number of levels, as a pivotal literary figure recounts his productive Parisian years. When White (Jack Holmes and His Friend, 2012, etc.) began his 16-year Parisian residence in 1983, he was flush from the success of both his breakthrough novel, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), and a Guggenheim
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“A significant reappraisal of a cultural icon and crucial booster of modern artists, especially African-American artists.” from the tastemaker
fellowship, and he was well on his way to establishing himself as the pre-eminent gay American writer of the era. “A Boy’s Own Story was presented to the world as a novel rather than as a memoir, but not out of a sense of discretion or modesty,” he writes. “It was just that back then only people who were already famous wrote their memoirs.” He continued to publish autobiographical novels but extended his literary reach to encompass biography and memoir (this is his third). The anecdotes and observations of the writer as social butterfly sustain plenty of interest, whether he’s overhearing Tina Turner tell Julian Barnes how much she loves his novels or describing being in the “historic, if tedious, company” of heiress and art patron Peggy Guggenheim. Some revelations are considerably more shocking, such as the story about the French actor and American writer who had sex “in an oven at Dachau while they were both tripping.” However, the broader cultural context elevates the memoir above gossip, as he writes of the onslaught of AIDS, then considered an American curiosity from which one could find refuge in Europe, and of the different attitudes and temperaments of the French, British and Americans. He ruminates on growing older and corpulent in a culture that prizes fitness and youth and of losing so many lovers and others to the scourge of AIDS. He also writes of his development as a literary stylist, one who “became simpler and more direct because of living in two languages.” Some of White’s observations on rape, feminism and promiscuity continue to shock, but the writer refuses to sentimentalize or pull punches, even (or especially) when the subject is himself.
THE TASTEMAKER Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America
White, Edward Farrar, Straus and Giroux (384 pp.) $30.00 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-0-374-20157-9 A significant reappraisal of a cultural icon and crucial booster of modern artists, especially African-American artists. Reading British journalist and historian White’s account of the extraordinary life of Chicago-born critic, novelist and photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), one is struck by how he toiled over many decades under a very fortunate star. He had not only the good luck to be in the right place at the right time—New York City during the Jazz Age—but also the prescience to grasp the significance of this modernist iconoclasm for American culture. As a Chicago novice newspaperman relocated to New York, Van Vechten cut his journalistic teeth on music criticism—e.g., covering Richard Strauss’ seminal Salome (adapted from Oscar Wilde’s play) at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907. In 1909, notes White, he intuited Isadora Duncan’s barefoot ballet as an “exuberant manifestation of a new type of art” without knowing anything about dance. From the exotic, unconventional Mabel Dodge, Van Vechten learned how to “bolster one’s own profile 84
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by championing the work of others”—e.g., their shared discovery of Gertrude Stein. Van Vechten published a series of “heretical” books throughout the 1920s about music and arts criticism, elevating the lowbrow or vulgar (ragtime, jazz, African-American art) and teaching the American public how to reappraise it. His novels were wildly popular, scandalous and largely forgotten; all the while, he had access to the rich gay bohemian underground, and he embarked in the 1930s on a fresh career as a portrait photographer just at the moment that photojournalism took off in America. In orderly chapters, White tackles this complicated, multifaceted, tremendously fascinating and contradictory subject: a married gay man, an alcoholic and always a “catalyst for outrage and argument.” A vigorous, fully fleshed biography of an important contributor to American culture. (38 b/w illustrations)
PLENTY OF TIME WHEN WE GET HOME Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War
Williams, Kayla Norton (288 pp.) $25.95 | Feb. 10, 2014 978-0-393-23936-2
An Iraq War veteran chronicles the emotionally raw, disarmingly candid saga of herself and her fellow veteran husband returning to civilian life psychologically and physically wounded. Williams previously shared her brutal saga of being female in a combat zone (Love My Rifle More Than You, 2005), alluding to it occasionally in this follow-up memoir. While in combat, she briefly met and felt close to Brian McGough. But he moved to a new assignment, where he suffered a severe brain injury from an explosive device. Stationed back in the United States, Williams located McGough, and they began a romantic relationship marked by threatened and actual violence due to his post-traumatic stress disorder and her undiagnosed psychological disabilities. Their military commands and the Veterans Administration seemed ill-equipped to deal sensitively and competently with such disabilities. In excruciating detail, Williams shares scenes from a marriage almost certain to explode. Even when she was away from her husband, Williams struggled with certain aspects of everyday life. Shopping alone in a gigantic Wal-Mart, she was overwhelmed by the variety of products, resentful that the civilian population was so spoiled, and anxiety-ridden that she could not view any store exits from the endless aisles of merchandise. Though counseling by civilians and military personnel occasionally helped both the author and her husband, progress toward a normal life seemed illusory—at best, one step forward and two steps back. How Williams and McGough partially conquered the demons, saved their marriage, began to rear children and helped countless other damaged veterans makes for an inspiring but never maudlin narrative. The memoir is certainly not a feminist tract, but Williams does examine the special adjustment problems of female combat veterans.
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LINCOLN’S BOYS John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln’s Image
A brave book filled with gore and trauma—and superb storytelling. A perfect complement to David Finkel’s Thank You for Your Service (2013).
PIERO’S LIGHT In Search of Piero della Francesca: A Renaissance Painter and the Revolution in Art, Science, and Religion
Witham, Larry Pegasus (368 pp.) $28.95 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-60598-494-0
Cultural historian Witham (Picasso and the Chess Player: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and the Battle for the Soul of Modern Art, 2013, etc.) returns with a wide-ranging account of the life, work and legacy of Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca (1412–1492). The author writes that he was drawn to Piero because of the interplay of art, religion and science in his work, and throughout this illuminating treatment, he unwinds and examines each of these cultural threads. First, Witham examines Piero’s life, a life, the author admits, whose details are hard to come by. (Iterations of “probably,” “no doubt” and the like appear often.) Still, some key documents have emerged over the years, and the author follows Piero from his boyhood in Sansepolcro, Italy (60 miles from Florence), to Florence, Ferrara, Rome (where he did some work for the Vatican), Urbino and elsewhere. Witham notes that Piero was wont to take on more commissions than he could handle, sometimes taking years to fulfill agreements. The author also pauses periodically to describe and appreciate Piero’s key artistic works—The Baptism of Christ, The Flagellation of Christ and others—as well as his various publications, including Abacus Treatise and On Perspective for Painting. The biographical focus on Piero ends about a third of the way through the volume (the artist died on the day Columbus arrived in the New World); in the remaining chapters, Witham deals with Piero’s slow rediscovery—by art historians and collectors and, even more interestingly, by mathematicians and scientists. Throughout, the author deals with concepts of vision, light, beauty and mind, drawing on the works and theories of numerous philosophers (from the ancient to the present world), psychologists and neuroscientists to illuminate the various debates about the nature of reality and of the mind. A thorough account of an actual “Renaissance man”— in every way. (16 pages of color illustrations)
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Zeitz, Joshua Viking (400 pp.) $29.95 | Feb. 3, 2014 978-0-670-02566-4
Zeitz (Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, 2006, etc.) approaches the already overloaded realm of Abraham Lincoln studies from a fresh direction. John Nicolay (1832–1901) and John Hay (1838–1905) were young, intelligent, ambitious men who became acquainted with Lincoln during his pre-presidential years in Springfield, Ill. When Lincoln shifted from obscure Illinois lawyer-legislator to the presidency within a four-year span, Nicolay and Hay became the key members of his staff, controlling access to him in the White House, drafting policy memos, traveling with him around the nation and attending to many of his personal needs. During the Civil War, Nicolay and Hay knew more about Lincoln’s thoughts and actions than anybody else. After the assassination, they had to figure out what to reveal about the president they considered a great patriot and in what form to do the revealing. Both experienced distinguished careers inside and outside government, married happily and raised families, but they knew implicitly that they would have to face up to the task of extending the Lincoln legacy. The result: two decades of extensive research with unparalleled access to Lincoln’s personal and presidential papers, culminating in a 10-volume, admiring biography. Zeitz does a masterful job delineating the lives of Nicolay and Hay, explaining their roles in political contests, narrating their interactions with Lincoln and placing the Nicolay-Hay biography within the larger context of Lincoln studies. The author is mostly admiring of Nicolay and Hay, while simultaneously factoring in their biases in the service of American history. Readers will quite likely realize the vital role of the massive biography in understanding the seemingly simple man who became a complicated national touchstone. Fascinating scholarship from Zeitz, who knows how to present history to an audience of nonspecialists.
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“Great for fans of Paul Theroux’s railroad journeys, except that Zoellner isn’t anywhere near as ill-tempered, and he has a better command of social history. A pleasure for literate travelers.” from train
TRAIN Riding the Rails that Created the Modern World—from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief
Zoellner, Tom Viking (384 pp.) $27.95 | Feb. 3, 2014 978-0-670-02528-2
A rousing around-the-world paean to the rumble of the rails by accomplished journalist Zoellner (A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America, 2011, etc.). The author, who commutes by train to his teaching job in Los Angeles, notes their utility in moving people and freight. Also, Zoellner finds trains good places to fall in love, if fleetingly, and to get reading and thinking done. Some of the things he thinks about are—well, things that it hasn’t occurred to other writers to ask about, such as the decidedly detrimental effects human excrement has on the rail lines of India: First, it eats away at the metal, and then it attracts insects that eat rail ties, telephone and signal poles, and even railroad cars themselves. (The Hindi word for “this universal human output” is goo.) Mostly, Zoellner concentrates on less icky topics, and often to memorable effect, as when he writes of a foggy journey through northern England, “a J.R.R. Tolkien vision come to life” and an “eldritch scene” to boot. England may be a land of plains and valleys “with an occasional volcanic knob on which the ruins of a fortress might be standing and one where the occupants had almost certainly sucked all the wealth from the surrounding fields and converted it into magnificent furniture and swords,” but America, with its continentally vast distances, has much catching up to do—for one thing, trains travel much slower here than they do elsewhere in the world. Having train-hopped across continents, Zoellner closes his account with a cleareyed look at what needs to happen in America if trains are to have a future—it will involve considerable infusions of money and overcoming vested-interest opposition. Great for fans of Paul Theroux’s railroad journeys, except that Zoellner isn’t anywhere near as ill-tempered, and he has a better command of social history. A pleasure for literate travelers.
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NAT THE CAT CAN SLEEP LIKE THAT
These titles earned the Kirkus Star:
Allenby, Victoria Illus. by Anderson, Tara Pajama Press (32 pp.) $19.95 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-927485-52-1
DREAM DOG by Lou Berger; illus. by David Catrow....................... 90 THE TYRANT’S DAUGHTER by J.C. Carleson....................................93 THE KILLING WOODS by Lucy Christopher......................................95 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE by Demi..................................................97 DARE THE WIND by Tracey Fern; illus. by Emily Arnold McCully.......................................................... 99 OPERATION BUNNY by Sally Gardner; illus. by David Roberts....101 PENGUIN IN PERIL by Helen Hancocks........................................... 103 MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH by Anne Isaacs; illus. by Kevin Hawkes......................................................................106 TIME FOR BED, FRED! by Yasmeen Ismail........................................106 BEYOND MAGENTA by Susan Kuklin..............................................109 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST by H. Chuku Lee; illus. by Pat Cummings.......................................................................110 A SNICKER OF MAGIC by Natalie Lloyd......................................... 112 NIGHTINGALE’S NEST by Nikki Loftin.......................................... 113 HALF A CHANCE by Cynthia Lord...................................................114 WILDWOOD IMPERIUM by Colin Meloy; illus. by Carson Ellis..... 115
Nat the cat is an expert sleeper…most of the time. In the morning, the humans in the family bump and clatter and honk and hurry, but from somewhere comes a snore. Who could that be? It’s Nat the orange tabby cat; he can apparently sleep anywhere. “Flopping halfway off a shelf, / Folded over on himself, // With his paws all tucked inside, / Or with limbs flung open wide— / Nat the cat can sleep like that!” He can sleep through anything and almost anywhere—but when night comes and the house is quiet, Nat springs into action; he can never sleep through the night. And his humans probably don’t either, since Nat plays with someone’s toes in bed, races down a shadowy hallway and even rides a hobbyhorse. Canadians Allenby and Anderson have captured a cat any young ailurophile will recognize. The simple rhyming text listing the odd (yet realistic) places Nat can sleep during the daytime and all the silly mischief he and his black-and-white kitten sidekick get up to at night will hook young listeners. The watercolor, acrylic and pencil illustrations of floppy, goggle-eyed Nat and his buddy are a just-right pairing. Good kitty fun that will demand repeated reads. (Picture book. 3-6)
WHITE HOT KISS
SAY HELLO LIKE THIS by Mary Murphy........................................ 117
Armentrout, Jennifer L. Harlequin Teen (384 pp.) $9.99 paper | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-373-21110-4 Series: Dark Elements Trilogy, 1
MAPLE by Lori Nichols...................................................................... 117 LITTLE POEMS FOR TINY EARS by Lin Oliver; illus. by Tomie dePaola........................................................................ 118 ZANE AND THE HURRICANE by Rodman Philbrick...................... 118 FLAME by Amy Kathleen Ryan..........................................................120 THE PORT CHICAGO 50 by Steve Sheinkin..................................... 123 THE DAY MY FATHER BECAME A BUSH by Joke van Leeuwen; trans. by Bill Nagelkerke.....................................................................126 THE BIG WORD FACTORY by Agnès de Lestrade; illus. by Valeria Docampo; dev. by mixtvision Digital................................................129 AWA, YOU DREAM TOO MUCH by Michel Digout; illus. by Simon Digout; dev. by tapatap......................................................................129 |
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Yes, it’s another novel about exotic paranormal hybrids, but this one’s written with wry humor that seeps into nearly every sentence, making it constantly entertaining no matter its subject. Layla is half Warden, gargoylelike creatures aligned with angels who roam cities slaughtering demons. She’s also half demon. Layla has been crushing on Zayne, a Warden who lives in their communal home, but knows she can’t ever kiss him for fear of sucking out his soul. Instead, Layla spends her after-school hours on the streets of Washington, D.C., marking |
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demons so that Wardens can easily find and kill them later that night. However, Layla misidentifies a demon that turns on her, whereupon she meets Roth, who shows up to protect her. As an upper-level demon, Roth can’t be tagged and would prove a difficult target for the Wardens. However, Layla finds herself strongly attracted to him and reluctantly begins to trust him. It doesn’t hurt that Roth is a great kisser. Layla’s problem with divided loyalties doesn’t interfere with the stopping-Armageddon plot, and the narrative sizzles with as much tension as romance. Armentrout’s sophisticated, layered humor keeps the narrative bubbling all the way through, and she delivers a terrific character in Roth, the unrepentant demon. Of course, both Zayne and Roth fit the chiseled-abs, drop-dead-gorgeous mold, but this is a romance. Totally entertaining. (Paranormal romance. 12 & up)
ANYONE BUT YOU
Askew, Kim; Helmes, Amy Merit Press (224 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 18, 2014 978-1-4405-7001-8 Series: Twisted Lit
Set in the heart of Chicago’s Little Italy, this modern-day take on Shakespeare’s famed star-crossed-love story finds Gigi (nee Julietta) Caputo and Roman Monte falling hard for each other despite the generations-old feud between their families. Though the Montes’ latest prank threatens to destroy her family’s restaurant business and send them packing to Peoria, Gigi can’t deny the power of first love. Together, she and Roman set out to uncover the truth behind the war and to heal old wounds so that they can be together. It’s a promising premise, but the novel never successfully rises to meet it. Alternating between the present-day account of Gigi and Roman’s plight and flashbacks to how the rift between the two families began, the novel has all of the requisite people and parts, but it ultimately lacks a soul. Riddled with clichés and bogged down by stilted, inauthentic dialogue, the story falls flat, never capturing the passion that is so essential to this classic tale. Roman and Gigi share only a few stolen moments, which will leave readers expecting a great romance both unsatisfied and unconvinced that what the teens feel for each other is anything more than a classic crush. Readers would be wise to choose another from the long list of retellings already out there…or better yet, stick with the original. (Fiction. 13 & up)
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ENCHANTED PALACE
Banks, Rosie Illus. by Orchard Books Scholastic (128 pp.) $4.99 paper | $4.99 e-book | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-545-53553-3 978-0-545-53625-7 e-book Series: Secret Kingdom, 1 A trio of friends travel to a magical kingdom to save the day in a syrupy series opener. Shy Summer, bold Jasmine and artistic Ellie are inseparable best friends. While helping clean up after a school rummage sale, they discover a mysterious wooden box decorated with a mirror, carved designs and glass stones. After they wipe the dust off of the mirror, a riddle appears. When the girls solve it, the box magically summons Trixi the pixie and King Merry, the ruler of their home, the Secret Kingdom (a magical world that exists alongside ours). The box was one of Merry’s inventions, designed to help him save his kingdom from his wicked sister, Queen Malice. Summer, Jasmine and Ellie go to the Secret Kingdom to stop Malice from spreading unhappiness. The evil queen has hidden six thunderbolts infused with wickedness throughout the kingdom, and the first one is planted somewhere at the palace, where it will ruin Merry’s birthday celebration. In addition to exploring the magical land, the girls must rescue Merry’s presents. In a theatrical final showdown with Malice’s forces, the girls must fill in on stage to thwart Malice’s evil plot to sabotage Merry’s birthday. The girls promise to return whenever they’re needed. Readers who can’t wait to return to the Secret Kingdom won’t have to—the second book, Unicorn Valley (9780-545-53554-0), is scheduled to publish simultaneously. Glitter, sparkles, tiaras and magic ahoy. (Unicorn Valley preview, Ellie character profile, character quiz) (Fantasy. 6-10)
PRESIDENT TAFT IS STUCK IN THE BATH
Barnett, Mac Illus. by Van Dusen, Chris Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 23, 2014 978-0-7636-6317-9
Barnett spins a probably apocryphal but nonetheless hilarious incident into a Cabinet-level crisis. In a natural extension of his rotund cameo in Judith St. George and David Small’s So You Want To Be President! (2000), the heaviest commander in chief finds himself immovably stuck in his (standard-sized) tub one morning. “Blast!” he fumes. “This could be bad.” Forced to seek help, he calls on his vice president and the secretaries of state, agriculture, war and the rest—but their advice (“Dynamite!” “A huge vat of butter”) have obvious flaws. Will he be forced to resign? Like Small in the aforementioned Caldecott winner, Van Dusen goes for a humorous, kirkus.com
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“Behrens invents a fictional Alice [Roosevelt], as she reveals in her author’s note, and writes the diary entries in credible period prose that’s still accessible to modern readers.” from when audrey met alice
rather than mean, caricature. He depicts the porky president as a corpulent, bare figure sporting artfully placed suds, plus a fierce glower and a bristling handlebar mustache over multiple chins. Eventually, the luxuriously appointed White House bathroom fills up with likewise caricatured officials. At the suggestion of the (petite) first lady, they pull together so effectively that they send their lardy leader rocketing out the window. Noting that when Taft denied having a bathtub custom made “[h]e was lying,” Barnett closes with a summary of his own research topped by an actual photograph of the oversized tub with several men posing inside. The soapiest, splashiest frolic featuring a head of state since Audrey and Don Wood’s King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub (1985). (Picture book. 6-9)
FIRE IN THE SEA
Bartlett, Myke Text (308 pp.) $9.95 paper | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-921922-74-9
WHEN AUDREY MET ALICE
Behrens, Rebecca Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (304 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4022-8642-1 This charming debut brings Alice Roosevelt to life when 13-year-old “first daughter” Audrey finds Alice’s centuryold diary and turns to it for advice. Audrey finds the White House to be more like a prison than a privilege, especially since her mom, the president, and her dad, a cancer researcher, find little time for her. Security concerns ruin her first party, and she has difficulty making friends at school. Poking around in a White House closet, Audrey finds a longhidden diary that belonged to Alice Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s spirited oldest daughter, and discovers that Alice shared many of her problems. Alice was older and much more rebellious, keeping a garter snake in her bag and smoking on the
Immortality, a sunken city, a violent Minotaur and a cult join in contemporary Australia for adventure that’s haphazard but fast-paced. Sadie longs to leave Perth’s stultifying beach days for “Oxford. Melbourne. Anywhere.” Excitement comes when she witnesses an attack on an old man. She chases off the attackers, and before dying in the hospital, the stranger bequeaths her his house—then promptly returns in a teenage body. Jake’s an 8,000-year-old immortal envoy from the Gods. The attackers, who escaped into the sea, are Drowners with “soft-boiled eyes” and “bile-coloured lips,” doomed to rot in the ocean depths. Jake guards a power-wielding demon in a box, which the Drowners want for their ruler, who’s underwater in Atlantis; but if anyone uses the demon’s power, “the Gods will set the whole planet ablaze.” There’s gore and nonstop action as Sadie and Jake dash around town coping with Drowners, a murderer, a human-devouring Minotaur and evangelists craving blood sacrifice who think Jake’s their savior. Despite deft handling of Sadie’s grief over her parents’ deaths years ago, Bartlett neglects Jake’s crucial emotional back story: Supposedly, fear and shame prevented Jake from solving the demon/Gods crisis ages ago, but the text gives barely a nod to Jake’s emotions, so that explanation seems empty. Narrative perspective wanders; careless slams (“lezzo”; the Drowners “look…Japanese”) rankle. Aussie-flavored excitement with ancient Greek tidbits, underdeveloped in places. (Fantasy. 12-15)
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“…readers can see Waffle in all his blue-and-white, surprisingly believable glory.” from dream dog
White House roof; she famously said she wanted to “eat up the world.” Audrey adopts Alice as her role model, making a bracelet for herself with the initials WWAD: What Would Alice Do? Audrey’s efforts to imitate Alice, however, only land her in more hot water. Behrens invents a fictional Alice, as she reveals in her author’s note, and writes the diary entries in credible period prose that’s still accessible to modern readers. Audrey knows that she’s just a normal girl for all that she lives in the White House, making Audrey and the story nicely accessible. An appealing journey and a fascinating life. (bibliography) (Fiction. 9-12)
THE END (ALMOST)
Benton, Jim Illus. by Benton, Jim Scholastic (40 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-545-17731-3
An unimpressive addition to the plethora of metafictive picture books flooding the market. The narrator opens this book by introducing Donut, a blue bear in sneakers. He’s rendered in a bold-lined, minimalist style and placed on a plain butter-yellow background. On the next page, after Donut burps, the narrator claims the story is over. At this point, it quickly becomes apparent that Donut and the narrator can communicate (Donut’s speech looks to be hand-lettered in dialogue bubbles, distinguishing it from the typeset narration). Donut does not want his story to end, and so begins a tedious back and forth between the two characters as the narrator attempts to convince Donut that the story is indeed over. Donut, in his turn, tries excuses, disguises and a tantrum—none of which is particularly clever—to augment his story, finally achieving success only to be thwarted when the book runs out of pages. The story ends with the narrator suggesting a reread, which Donut joyously encourages, but it may leave readers wondering why they would want to spend even more time with such an uninspired book. This story lacks the cleverness and originality that make a metafictive picture book successful, though it could be useful as a creative-writing prompt with older children. (Picture book. 3- 7)
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GOING ROGUE
Benway, Robin Walker (320 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-8027-3604-8 Series: Also Known As, 2 As a key member of a spy family, 17-year-old Maggie Silver discovers that allowing BFF Roux and boyfriend Jesse to get swept up in her exciting lifestyle has unforeseen consequences, including getting her friends into some seriously dangerous situations. Raised from the age of 4 as a master safecracker, spunky Maggie is a member of the Collective, an undercover Robin Hood–style organization that works to right wrongs and prosecute bad guys. Things go badly awry when Maggie attempts to thwart a Collective member who is maneuvering to have her parents discredited and removed from the organization. High shenanigans and chases through the streets of New York erupt, with stolen Fabergé eggs, gold coins, bomb blasts and sniper attacks adding to the confusion. Maggie and friends are summarily removed by their protectors to a Paris safe house, where they meet other Collective members who have been doublecrossed by the corrupt organization. Various muddled plots unravel, culminating in a denouement in the Louvre, as spies and agents try to entrap the evil Collective member. While the spy story is good fun and Maggie’s quandaries will resonate with readers, the action at times slows to a crawl with her lengthy internal monologues, and characters tend to be flat. A fluffy romp with authentic teen dialogue, cardboard characters and a plot gone rogue. (Thriller. 14 & up)
DREAM DOG
Berger, Lou Illus. by Catrow, David Schwartz & Wade/Random (40 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Feb. 24, 2014 978-0-375-86655-5 978-0-375-96655-2 PLB The common developmental stage of imaginary friendship is creatively and charmingly addressed in this bittersweet tale of a boy and his dogs—one real and one pretend (or maybe not). Harry lives alone with his dad. Harry wants a dog, but Dad has allergies. So Harry puts on his X-35 Infra-Rocket Imagination Helmet and conjures up his own perfect pet, a dream dog named Waffle. This new pet is huge and fuzzy, all light blue and white like cumulous clouds, and only Harry can see him. Waffle and Harry become best pals, with Harry’s dad playing along with the idea of the imaginary dog—though readers can see Waffle in all his blue-and-white, surprisingly believable glory. When Dad’s allergies suddenly improve, he brings home a real dog. A little adjustment of the helmet ensures that new dog Bumper can see Waffle, and Harry takes both dogs to the park. kirkus.com
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In a stunning conclusion, Waffle chases after fluffy clouds and disappears into the sky, leaving Harry not to mourn (he knows Waffle is happy) but to devote himself to Bumper. An imaginative, humorous text is well-complemented by large-format illustrations in gouache, pencil and ink. The busy illustrations are filled with fanciful details and funny peripheral characters, but Waffle is a captivating star with a real personality all his own. This delightful story waffles irresistibly between reality and fantasy, and young readers will find Waffle the dream dog a tasty treat. (Picture book. 4-7)
DO YOU KNOW LEECHES?
Bergeron, Alain M.; Quintin, Michel; Sampar Illus. by Sampar Fitzhenry & Whiteside (64 pp.) $9.95 paper | Mar. 30, 2014 978-1-55455-318-1
A dribble of scientific information about everyone’s favorite bloodsucking worm provides a Canadian cartoonist with opportunities for some rousingly icky visual commentary. The informational text comprises such lines as “Most leeches live in fresh water,” or “Oftentimes, doctors would apply up to 100 leeches per session,” arranged in no discernible order and placed inconspicuously at the bottom of each page. They caption cartoon scenes of a young collector cheerfully dumping a slimy bucketful into his horrified parent’s bathwater, a doctor leaning over a desiccated patient (“Something tells me we might have left these leeches on a bit too long”), a child refusing to enter a pond for fear of the creatures—unaware that her back is covered with them—and other views of comically caricatured leeches and their prey in action or conversation. Though readers will be at least exposed to some basic information about these creatures’ habitats, body parts, dietary habits, reproductive practices and uses in medicine, Sampar’s grossout gags and comics will definitely make, and leave, the more lasting impression. This outing is published with seven series mates that offer less revolting but no less superficial (and, OK, diverting) introductions to chameleons, crocodiles, crows, porcupines, rats, spiders and toads. Strong-stomached browsers will lap these up; budding naturalists will find better intellectual nourishment elsewhere. (glossary, index) (Graphic nonfiction. 8-10)
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OTHERSPHERE
Berry, Nina Kteen (320 pp.) $9.95 paper | Jan. 1, 2014 978-0-7582-9238-4 Series: Otherkin, 3 The third and final installment of the Otherkin series reunites readers with Dez and the other shifters at Morfael’s school for otherkin just six weeks after their bittersweet triumph over Ximon and the Tribunal (Othermoon, 2013). Despite a passionate new love, Dez can’t seem to shake the feelings of guilt over Siku’s tragic death and Caleb’s disappearance. Torn between her love for two brothers and the desire to know with certainty who she truly is and where she belongs, Dez once again finds herself battling demons from the Othersphere and confronting newfound and sometimes difficult truths about her biological family. Of the three books in the series, this is by far the weakest. Steamy love scenes are few and far between. Intriguing relationships, like the burgeoning lesbian love affair between London and Amaris, are never explored in any sort of meaningful or satisfying manner. And after spending the two previous novels loving to hate the deliciously evil Ximon, readers anxious for one final, climactic confrontation with the leader of the Tribunal will be left disappointed. While fans of the series may be left longing for the novel that could have been, Dez’s quest to belong remains an intriguing plotline, and there are enough action sequences and otherworldly adventures to keep readers from giving out halfway through. All things considered, it’s a disappointing denouement. (Paranormal romance. 14 & up)
REAL AS IT GETS
Billingsley, ReShonda Tate Dafina/Kensington (208 pp.) $9.95 paper | Dec. 31, 2013 978-0-7582-8955-1 Series: Rumor Central, 3 After a new drug leads to fatalities among celebrities and classmates, teen TV-gossip diva Maya Morgan launches an investigation. The strung-out former beauty queen whose story opens this third volume of the Rumor Central series represents only one of many plotlines. Maya’s player cousin, Travis, comes from New York to Miami to live with Maya and her family, and tension rises when Travis starts dating Maya’s best friend, Sheridan. Maya goes out with a dreamy date, but sometimes he acts like he’s hiding something. Maya’s nerdy friend, Alvin, starts dating a girl, and Maya can’t understand why she feels so angry about it. (This last plotline receives the least closure, but it will likely be addressed more fully in a future installment.) Maya’s back story is skillfully reintroduced piece |
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by piece, and new and returning readers alike have ample tools to keep track of the many boys and BFFs in Maya’s life. The drug investigation, which brings together many of the characters and storylines, leads to a suspenseful and dangerous climax, but Maya’s confident, clever and funny narrative voice makes the seriousness feel in keeping with the rest of the story. From gossip to guns, a fast-paced and enjoyable ride. (Fiction. 12-18)
BEFORE MY EYES
Bock, Caroline St. Martin’s Griffin (320 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-250-04558-4 978-1-250-03567-7 e-book The final moments before a disturbed young man sprays bullets into a crowd at a political event form the opening of this grim but intelligent novel. The worlds of three teens overlap at the end of a summer that has brought unwelcome changes into their respective lives. Max, the privileged but miserable son of a state senator, meets and can’t get out of his mind a thoughtful, grieving young woman named Claire, whose beloved mom is hospitalized following a stroke. At the same time, Max’s coworker Barkley, who writes crazed political missives to Max’s father, has begun to hear a voice directing his actions and has also spotted and become obsessed with Claire. Alternating narratives in the first person by each of the three at times seem to go on a bit too long, given that it’s clear from the beginning what the outcome will be. Claire is the most likable, and readers will appreciate her lack of cookie-cutter edges, both in her physical description and in her emotional ups and downs as she takes care of her younger sister largely on her own. Max is less sympathetic, at times frustratingly self-absorbed, but is also clearly struggling. And Barkley, adrift in an increasingly violent storm of mental illness, is deeply troubling. Gripping, disturbing and nuanced. (Fiction. 14 & up)
THE MAGIC MISTAKE
Brauner, Barbara; Mattson, James Iver Illus. by Halpin, Abigail Disney Hyperion (256 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4231-6475-3 Series: Oh My Godmother, 2 The return of fairy godmother Katarina once again casts 12-year-old Lacey’s life into disorder. When Katarina arrives with the momentous news that Lacey has been selected to join the Godmother Academy as a trainee, Lacey declines the offer. However, her cat accidentally commits her to a godmother task, 92
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and Lacey learns that if she does not fulfill her assigned client’s dream, both she and her client will suffer lasting consequences. In less than a week’s time, Lacey has to discover the client’s true love and host a dream wedding. As in series opener The Glitter Trap (2013), Lacey’s spells go comically awry as she struggles to master the intricacies of magic. Returning characters Sunny and Paige have strong supportive roles in this sequel, aiding Lacey in her efforts. With wry humor, Brauner and Mattson alter traditional fairy-tale lore, as when Lacey sets hordes of love-struck frogs in pursuit of her client by mistake. In the middle of the magical chaos, Lacey must also contend with life as a sixth-grader. She copes with her evolving friendship with Scott, inadvertently enters her school’s mascot competition and conquers her dread of basketball. Halpin’s winsome, lighthearted illustrations enhance the merry exuberance of the tale. Quick-witted and spunky, Lacey beguiles readers in her second adventure. (Fantasy. 9-12)
UNFORGOTTEN
Brody, Jessica Farrar, Straus and Giroux (416 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-374-37990-2 Series: Unremembered, 2 On the run from Diotech, the biotechnology company that created her, Sera has time traveled with her beloved Zen to an English farm in the year 1609. When Zen becomes sick, however, and Sera uses her superhuman strength in front of witnesses, the two of them lose their safe haven. So begins a journey through time and geography that brings Sera to a future New York as well as to a hidden submarine. In the beginning, most of the duo’s plans and knowledge originate with Zen, but once he is confined to a sickbed, Sera begins scheming and acting on her own. She finds a rival (and the de rigueur third leg of a love triangle) in Kaelen, another Diotech creation who introduces himself to Sera as “like you....[o]nly better.” Sera’s realworld knowledge sometimes feels arbitrarily spotty: She’s never learned about sex, for instance, and when she comes to Zen feeling “this crazy...urge. Like a craving,” his offer to explain what’s happening by showing her comes off as more sinister than romantic. The mechanics of time travel, memory implants and other key plot elements don’t always hold up to scrutiny, but the point here is less airtight worldbuilding than romance, quick life-or-death action, and glimpses into an imagined past and future. A solid second installment that should please fans of the first. (Science fiction. 12-18)
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“Carleson shrewdly makes what has become a sadly familiar story on the evening news accessible by focusing on the experiences of one innocent girl at the center of it.” from the tyrant’s daughter
PROMISE BOUND
Brown, Anne Greenwood Delacorte (368 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-385-74383-9 978-0-385-37129-2 e-book 978-0-375-99131-8 PLB Series: Lies Beneath, 3 This conclusion to Brown’s mermaid trilogy follows efforts to reunite families and to gain power among the mermaids of Lake Superior. Lily, at age 18, is a bit of a reluctant mermaid. She has a human mother who’s afflicted with multiple sclerosis and a father who, as a merbaby raised on land, was not returned to the mermaids as required by an unbreakable mermaid promise. Lily’s heartthrob, Calder, is actually around 50, but as merpeople age far more slowly than humans, he looks like an adolescent. Learning he was kidnapped as a toddler and transformed into a merman, Calder heads north to try to find his biological human parents. Meanwhile, Lily tries to convince one of the mermaid sisters—both locked in an internal power struggle—to transform her mother in order to save her life. All the while, Lily seems to be in contact with the spirit of Nadia, who wants somehow to keep her broken promise to Calder’s birth mother to return her son. Brown writes with more sophistication than usual in mermaid fiction, lifting this book a bit above the norm for the genre, and she displays a good touch for characterization, thanks in part to an alternating first-person narration; even the more villainous mermaid sister feels well-rounded and believable. Good entertainment for fans of the genre. (Paranormal suspense. 12 & up)
THE HIT
Burgess, Melvin Chicken House/Scholastic (304 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-545-55699-6 978-0-545-55700-9 e-book After 20 years of economic recession, the gaps between England’s rich and poor are wider and starker than ever. Young lovers Lizzie and Adam are keenly aware of the challenges they face: She’s been raised in a bubble of privilege, while he’s from a family barely scraping by due to his father’s disability. Against this backdrop of economic and social inequity, the hot new recreational drug is Death, which gives its users one extraordinary last week of life, followed by, well, death. Adam and Lizzie are curious, but they steer clear of Death until Adam’s brother, Jess, who’s been keeping their family afloat financially as a chemist, is suddenly revealed to be a member of the revolutionary political group the Zealots (akin to the hacker group Anonymous, if they |
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resorted to self-immolation and suicide bombings). Shattered by the news of his brother’s secret life and presumed death, Adam attends a disastrous party with Lizzie, steals a stash of Death and in a reckless moment of grief, takes the drug. From there, the plot—jam-packed with ill-advised escapades, secret identities, fights and chases—threatens to spiral out of control, but in spite of some Grand Guignol violence administered by grotesque villains just this side of Carl Hiaasen, Burgess’ surprisingly gritty hero and heroine are able to enjoy some muted hopefulness for their pains. Refreshingly rooted in the issues of the day, Burgess’ near-future thriller stands out. (Dystopian thriller. 15-18)
THE TYRANT’S DAUGHTER
Carleson, J.C. Knopf (304 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-449-80997-6 978-0-449-81000-2 e-book 978-0-449-80998-3 PLB A teenage girl from an unnamed Middle Eastern country attempts to come to terms with her dictator father’s bloody legacy in this absorbing character-driven novel authored by a former CIA official. Fifteen-year-old Laila lives in a shabby apartment outside of Washington, D.C., with her mother and little brother. She misses her homeland, but return is impossible since her uncle had her father assassinated and took control of the government. “I’m half Here. I’m half There. I’m a girl divided, which is to say I’m no one at all.” While her mother schemes with both American officials and rebels from their country to remedy their untenable situation, Laila reluctantly begins to enjoy the simple freedoms of school and friendships. But worrisome thoughts of her mother’s secretive phone calls and the mysterious CIA agent who lurks around their apartment are never far from her mind. And how will she ever reconcile what she now knows about her father the dictator with the loving man who raised her? Carleson shrewdly makes what has become a sadly familiar story on the evening news accessible by focusing on the experiences of one innocent girl at the center of it. Laila is a complex and layered character whose nuanced observations will help readers better understand the divide between American and Middle Eastern cultures. Smart, relevant, required reading. (author’s note, commentary, further reading) (Fiction. 13 & up)
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“This third series installment, true to form, teems with goofy gadgetry that will delight young readers and presents a continuingly charming, nerdy protagonist….” from game of clones
FEELINGS!
Carpenter, Tad Illus. by Carpenter, Tad LB Kids/Little, Brown (18 pp.) $6.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-316-20074-5 Series: I Say, You Say This new addition to the I Say, You Say series invites a young audience to playfully explore the world of emotions. Quickly falling into a predictable and comforting pattern, the left-hand page introduces a feeling—“I say happy, you say…”—and the gatefold flap on the right-hand page lifts to reveal a corresponding response: “SMILE!” Other feelings include grumpy, silly, sad, excited, sleepy, hurt and love. The bright, busy pages, which star wide-eyed, cartoon-style animal characters in situations typically associated with the emotions featured, will appeal to little ones and help them to understand the concepts presented. For instance, a scowling cat getting drenched in the rain illustrates “grumpy”; a crying gorilla with a bee sting on his thumb aptly represents “hurt”; and pairs of cuddling and kissing animals symbolize “love.” In companion title Colors! (978-0-316-20072-1), the left-hand page offers an object—“I say apples, you say…”—and the gatefold reveals the name of the color: “RED!” Little ones will enjoy the repetition and interactivity of these offerings, celebrating as they correctly guess the words hiding under the flaps. Carpenter’s predicable, interactive titles in the I Say, You Say series offer appealing introductions to basic concepts just right for toddlers and preschoolers. (Picture book. 1-3)
GAME OF CLONES
Castle, M.E. Egmont USA (256 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-60684-234-8 Series: Clone Chronicles, 3 It’s a clone-apalooza in Palo Alto as Fisher Bas and his much cooler clone, Two, return to life at Wampalog Middle School (Cloneward Bound, 2013). Fisher and Two aren’t the only Fisher Bas-es in town anymore. Before the boys even have one middle school dance under their belts to revel in their shiny, new, freshfrom-saving-the-world-in-Los-Angeles-hero status, Three turns up in all of his evil, power-hungry glory. This third series installment, true to form, teems with goofy gadgetry that will delight young readers and presents a continuingly charming, nerdy protagonist who remains worthy of the special place he’s likely earned in the hearts of the series’ fans. In a nice turn of events, Two is allowed to really come into his own in this novel, as Fisher is finally forced to introduce him to his parents. Together, the family rightly decides that Two should have a proper name 94
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(Alex) and that the boys should be permitted to go to school together as cousins. With the truth (kind of) out, Fisher, Alex and a small posse of helpers, including a winged pet pig and Amanda Cantrell, Wampalog’s female wrestling champ, are free to lead the fight against Three’s quest for world domination. Once again, this Clone Chronicles novel strikes just the right balance between over-the-top adventure and real-life middle school drama. A character-driven, action-packed success. (Fantasy. 9-12)
THE YEAR OF THE HORSE
Chin, Oliver Illus. by Wood, Jennifer Immedium (36 pp.) $15.95 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-59702-080-0 Series: Tales from the Chinese Zodiac, 9 The ninth installment from the Tales from the Chinese Zodiac picture-book series offers readers a look into the characteristics of being born in the Year of the Horse. Hannah, a bright-eyed foal, and her human friend Tom wonder what they’ll be when they grow up. Equine family and friends tell what they do for a living: Papa is a racehorse and Mama a show horse, and Uncle Fu pulls large loads. Hannah’s abilities are tested when Tom’s art teacher, Lao Shi, asks Tom to take her commissioned painting to the governor at the capital, a long journey away. Tom needs a partner, and after he interviews other animals (all from the Chinese zodiac) for the job, Hannah announces she can do it. According to the author’s note, people born in horse years are energetic and animated but also impatient or headstrong. Enlivened with Wood’s peppy, commercial-looking illustrations, the story feels most energetic when the twosome learn to work together as one, as they encounter hazards (other zodiac animals) during their journey. But there is a missed opportunity. The tale overloads on only favorable horse personality traits, leading to a predictable outcome. Chin (The Year of the Snake, 2013, etc.) overlooks flaws, like impatience, which robs Hannah of the chance to overcome and rise above them. A one-note ride into an enjoyable Chinese lunar-calendar tradition, this trots instead of gallops. (list of zodiac animals) (Fiction. 4-8)
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THE KILLING WOODS
Christopher, Lucy Chicken House/Scholastic (384 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-545-46100-9 978-0-545-57671-0 e-book This taut, psychologically realistic murder mystery knits trauma, danger, tragedy and hope into one cohesive tale. In a horrifying opening scene, Emily watches her father return from the forest carrying what looks like an injured deer but turns out to be a girl—dead. Dad’s having a flashback to the military event that gave him PTSD. As a soldier, he’d accidentally killed a civilian; did he kill this girl, Ashlee, as well? Ashlee’s boyfriend, Damon, awakens hung over the next morning, confused that Ashlee’s not in his bed. They’d been in Darkwood the night before with his mates, playing the Game. Ashlee gave Damon hallucinogenic drugs, and he can’t remember how the night—or the Game— ended. Damon and Emily alternate chapters in distinct firstperson voices. Damon’s traumatized by Ashlee’s murder and his father’s military death; Emily’s devastated that her sometimes-violent yet “scared of everything” father—possibly innocent—is pleading guilty to manslaughter. Darkwood’s thick forest, high peak and leftover war bunker make a vivid setting. Readers will be riveted by slow, potent reveals about the rough nature of the Game, Ashlee’s insistence on danger and adrenaline, and what happened that night. The answers hurt, but they feel right and they make sense. A sprout of hope at the end is fragile and unforced. A gripping, heartbreaking, emotionally substantial look at war wounds and the allure of danger. (Mystery. 14 & up)
A IS FOR AWESOME
Clayton, Dallas Illus. by Clayton, Dallas Candlewick (32 pp.) $14.99 | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-7636-5745-1
The creator of An Awesome Book! (2012) and its titularly similar companions offers an alphabet of uplift. In lines of sometimes forcibly compelled rhyme (“Q is for Quiet / To escape from the madness / R is for Reading / But also for radness”), Clayton blends hand-lettered, characteristically inspirational watchwords and exhortations to dream big, aim high and make the most of the day, the world and life. These he surrounds with a smattering of pictures of unlabeled but common items and animals that are drawn in an engagingly simple, artless way and start with the appropriate letter. (Generally anyway: Viewers will likely puzzle over the guitar on the “A” page, and is the inscrutable lumplet in “C” a Cocoon? A sea Cucumber?) Children may enjoy the intellectual exercise of identifying the tiny images more than winkling personal meaning out |
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of “E is for Everything / under the sun” or “V is for Values / and keeping them true,” but the feel-good tone is catching, and the sentiments make fertile discussion fodder. Not awe-ful. (Inspirational picture book. 6-8, adult)
YEAR OF MISTAKEN DISCOVERIES
Cook, Eileen Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (272 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-1-4424-4022-7 978-1-4424-4024-1 e-book
Avery and Nora were best friends, drawn together by the fact that they were both adopted. After Nora dies, Avery feels partially responsible. The girls grew apart as Avery became a cheerleader and acquired a shell of popularity, willingly accepting superficiality in herself and her friends for appearances’ sake. Nora, a true individual who’s briefly though sympathetically sketched, had begun a challenging senior project, aided by her gently supportive friend, Brody: to locate her birth mother. The painful outcome of her search turns out to be too much of an emotional burden; right after passing on a journal of the quest to Avery—along with obvious clues to her desperate emotional state that Avery ignores—Nora kills herself. Avery, focused on how it might positively affect her application to Duke University, decides she’ll honor Nora’s memory by searching for her own birth mother. Avery has her eye on the bottom line, and she facilely, fluently lies to people around her if it advances her cause. This ultimately undermines her climactic revelation of the error of her ways. More effective is her wry, often sarcastic voice, which is sometimes hilarious, as when she describes her boyfriend’s bumbling sexual advances: “[I]t felt like he was trying to start a fire Boy Scout style.” An insightful, entertaining exploration of the impact of a suicide that may leave its audience uncertain about the sincerity of the protagonist. (Fiction. 14-18)
CHANGERS Drew
Cooper, T; Glock-Cooper, Allison Black Sheep/Akashic (256 pp.) $18.95 | $11.95 paper | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-61775-211-7 978-1-61775-195-0 paper Series: Changers, 1 On the morning of the first day of high school, a boy named Ethan wakes up as a girl named Drew. Turns out Drew is a Changer, one of “an ancient race of humans” who wake up as a different person on the first day of each year of high school (how ancient Changers transformed |
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before the existence of high schools is one of many questions left oddly unaddressed). Similarly, readers learn that Changers will “help make the world a better place,” that Changers see non-Changers’ (aka Statics’) futures when they kiss, and that all Changers wear an emblem branded on their hips—but they are never told why these things are true nor what’s wrong with the world and how Changers will help. Drew’s narrative voice is engaging, often sarcastic and sometimes poignant. Her outsider observations about how it feels to be a girl and how girls are treated are genuine, keenly observed and sometimes funny (“Also, girls aren’t allowed to fart. Ever”). Two love interests develop for Drew, a Changer boy and a Static girl, and their genders are, refreshingly, a nonissue, though Drew’s interest in a Changer violates another seemingly arbitrary Changer rule against Changer-Changer liaisons. A fresh and charmingly narrated look at teens and gender, but the worldbuilding is distractingly bizarre. (Urban fantasy. 12-18)
LOST LITTLE PENGUIN
Corderoy, Tracey Illus. by Gavin, Scott Capstone Young Readers (32 pp.) $14.95 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-1-62370-116-1 A wee, willful penguin learns a valuable lesson on false assumptions—and
friendship. Penguins Percy and Posy warn their pal Plip to finish his fish snack so that Wal-the-Wump won’t snap it up. Plip pooh-poohs this notion, dismissing Wal-the-Wump as just a grumpy old walrus. The trio takes a refreshing swim, with Plip careful to keep his favorite toy, a cloth caterpillar that he calls Sockybug, from getting wet. After the swim, they play Wal-the-Wump games, pretending to be the big creature, until it’s time for a nap—but where’s Sockybug? All the penguins search high and low for the little toy, but there’s not a sign of Sockybug. Snow clouds gather, and the sky grows dark. It’s time to go home, but Plip won’t: “He’s my friend.” Suddenly remembering where he left Sockybug, Plip slides down a snowy hill, with Percy and Posy in hot pursuit. They run smack into Wal-the-Wump, so enormous that he takes up two pages of the book, turned sideways! Wal flashes his giant teeth and lets out a hearty “Ho, ho, ho!” Before long, all three penguins are romping with their huge new friend, and Plip makes each his own Sockybug. The story takes quite a long time to get to where it’s going, with little action to keep readers engaged. The illustrations are genial, if generic. Well-meaning and cute but ultimately slight. (Picture book. 3-5)
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THE LION WHO STOLE MY ARM
Davies, Nicola Illus. by Wright, Annabel Candlewick (96 pp.) $14.99 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-7636-6620-0
The terrifying title should attract readers with strong stomachs. Pedru, son of the best local hunter, lives in a village in East Africa. His senses are attuned to the local animals, but one night, while checking his snares at dusk, a lion attacks him. Pedru courageously fights, but he loses his right arm. His life is entirely changed by this event, as the boy meets scientists who are studying lions. He and his father become involved in this project, and his father is later hired when a tourist lodge that allows the lions to be seen but not hunted is built nearby. Pedru goes to college and becomes a scientist himself. The pen-and-wash illustrations provide details on the people, animals and village life in this part of Africa. An afterword gives information about lion-conservation projects and how they protect people while allowing the large cats to live. The author points out that the public should support such projects, but the tourist industry must also provide funds for local people to get the safety fencing, lights and correctly constructed houses. Although the building of the tourist lodge (by an important soccer player related to one of the conservation-project staff members) seems a little farfetched, this brief tale bridges the gap between the few picture books and longer novels set in this region. Though on the purposive side, the tale both provides adventure and fills a cultural niche for chapter-book readers (Fiction. 8-10)
STORMBRINGER
Delany, Shannon St. Martin’s Griffin (320 pp.) $9.99 paper | Jan. 14, 2014 978-1-250-01865-6 Series: Weather Witch, 2 Following the events of Weather Witch (2013), Jordan trains to become a Conductor—the human battery of an airship— while her love interest and would-be rescuer falls in with sky pirates. Aboard the Artemesia, there’s a lot going on. Jordan is forced to use weather magic, an illusionist (the “Wandering Wallace”) forwards a mysterious agenda, and Bran (plus his partner and daughter) is held captive by Marion, a witch he Made—and they all take turns as point-of-view characters in third-person narration. Jordan’s slated to replace the ship’s dying Conductor once she learns the job. She’s still a doomed victim awaiting rescue when the captain, finding her beautiful, subjects her to new, adult horrors. Finally, she discovers the key to her powers: rage. kirkus.com
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“Demi’s pictures feature her exquisite line and magnificent use of color, manipulating the flat, decorative space she uses to advance the story.” from florence nightingale
Meanwhile, her sweetheart Rowen’s shanghaied onto a pirate airship, where he meets anti-slavery captain Elizabeth. She soon shows her quasi-captive the secret workings of her ship’s illegal steam technology. Of other subplots, the best involves corrupt Council members and their plot to maintain an unjust status quo. The rhetoric is decidedly current for the period setting: Elites discuss the political advantages of quagmire wars, and one character implores another: “Be the change you want to see.” With so many viewpoints and separate storylines, all plots inch along slowly, with their convergences only hinted at for future installments. Readers who liked the first novel will enjoy the fleshedout world; others (especially readers frustrated with Jordan’s passivity) should pass. (Fantasy. 13-16)
SOMETHING REAL
Demetrios, Heather Henry Holt (416 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-8050-9794-8
This chilling satire follows one teenager’s efforts to escape from the reality TV franchise financially supporting her large family. Chloe’s suicide attempt abruptly ended her family’s 19 Kids and Counting–style reality show. During the following four camera-free years, she changed her name and overcame debilitating panic attacks, successfully concealing her fame. Now a high school senior on the cusp of a new romance, Chloe panics when an invasive new reality show contract exposes her identity. Genuinely terrified of exposing herself and her friends to public criticism and humiliation, Chloe begs for privacy. The convincingly malevolent program producer responds with threats of financial ruin for the entire family, and Chloe’s monstrous mother dismisses the requests as selfish teen rebellion—even implying that Chloe’s suicide attempt ruined the family. In her real life, Chloe longs for her family’s acceptance, but their continual refusal to consider her needs leads to periodic outbursts of frustrated rage—which are then cited as evidence of her instability. Throughout the frustrating cycle of absurdity, Chloe’s unflinchingly raw voice avoids didacticism as she grapples with privacy in the modern age. Discussions of Orwell’s 1984 in her civics class also provide surprisingly natural opportunities for readers to consider how their own media-consumption habits may be contributing to a culture that seems disinclined to value others’ right to privacy. Sobering and thought-provoking ideas wrapped in an engaging plot. (Fiction. 12 & up)
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FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
Demi Illus. by Demi Henry Holt (40 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-8050-9729-0 Demi wields her gifts to celebrate Florence Nightingale, who transformed the care of the sick and injured. Florence Nightingale was born to wealthy English parents in Florence, Italy, and from an early age studied nursing and the care of the sick. As her family traveled from England to Italy, France and Germany, she visited hospitals and poorhouses to teach herself and to compare healing strategies. She went to Turkey to assist injured soldiers from the Crimean War, working to ensure sanitary conditions and to make healthful food and medicines available. The text is direct and clear, conveying complex information fluidly. Demi’s pictures feature her exquisite line and magnificent use of color, manipulating the flat, decorative space she uses to advance the story. She makes beautiful decorative patterns out of difficult and sometimes horrific situations. Nurses cleaning, scrubbing, comforting and assisting are directed by Nightingale, always pictured in a midnightblue dress or cloak. One astonishing, gutsy double-page spread depicts the war hospital in Turkey. Leaking walls, rats, garbage and overflowing chamber pots among the stricken soldiers make a formal backdrop to officials rebuffing Nightingale and her nurses. With the turn of the page, readers see the changes in cleanliness, care and mood Nightingale effected. Characteristically beautiful illustrations nevertheless provide a pull-no-punches appreciation of the Lady with the Lamp. (timeline, further reading) (Picture book/ biography. 7-11)
EXTRAORDINARY WARREN A Super Chicken
Dillard, Sarah Illus. by Dillard, Sarah Aladdin (64 pp.) $12.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-4424-5340-1
This is a story that keeps interrupting itself. A few pages into the comic, the narration is drowned out by sound effects. A flock of chicks keeps squawking for two pages straight. It happens right in the middle of a sentence: “They pecked all day long. EVERY SINGLE DAY. It drove Warren…Peep! Peck! Peck! Peck! / CRAZY.” (Eight nearly identical panels labeled Sunday through Sunday show four chicks peeping and pecking, as Warren looks on with increasing exasperation.) This is, presumably, supposed to be an amusing, postmodern device, but mostly it’s just an annoyance. In fairness, it’s supposed to be annoying. Warren hates the daily routine on the farm. He says, “I’ve had enough pecking and |
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“Erlings’ poetic, graceful language is an overt tribute to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.” from boy on the edge
peeping….I am MORE than just an ORDINARY CHICKEN.” Warren becomes a sort of poultry superhero, rescuing the others from Millard the rat, who has invited them all to a barbecue. Large sections of the plot may feel familiar. The book feels much like the film Chicken Run, for example. But the story isn’t the point. The point is the jokes, which are terrible and brilliant in equal measure. When Warren bumps into an egg, he says, “OEUF!” The simple line drawings are charming. The text is a matter of taste. It will be a hit with fans of borscht-belt humor. Everyone else may be driven…CRAZY. (Graphic fiction. 6-9)
BOY ON THE EDGE
Erlings, Fridrik Candlewick (240 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-7636-6680-4
From an award-winning Icelandic author comes a parable of hope against a backdrop of unrelenting emotional hardship. Henry, an outcast with a clubfoot and a stutter, has lived with brutality his whole life. Shunted from school to school by a mother desperate to regain control over her own life, Henry’s anger finally explodes in violence against her. The state sends him to a remote, coastal corner of Iceland to live with other troubled boys at the Home of Lesser Brethren. On a farm run by the neurotically zealous Rev. Oswald and his kind wife, Emily, he feels truly accepted only by the farm animals he tends. Still unable to build relationships with the people around him, his loneliness threatens to overcome him. He finds a kind of inner peace on the lava outcroppings that loom above the sea. With the help of a golden-haired little boy who finds his way into Henry’s heart, he’s finally able to overcome his reticence to communicate and to see that others also struggle with the fine line between good and evil. Erlings’ poetic, graceful language is an overt tribute to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. A powerful, Christian-themed exploration of a journey to self-acceptance and hard-won friendship. (Fiction. 12 & up)
STELLA
Eve, Helen St. Martin’s Griffin (362 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Mar. 25, 2014 978-1-250-04817-2 978-1-4668-4109-3 e-book A clash between boarding school rivals becomes a platform for a thoughtprovoking, in-depth dual character study. Caitlin finds herself suddenly moved from Manhattan to a posh boarding school in England when her parents divorce. There, shy Caitlin admires the beautiful, brilliant Stella, who rules the school with 98
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her posse of five friends, the Stars. When she banishes one of her Stars for a minor infraction, she invites Caitlin to join her exclusive group. Popular for the first time in her life, Caitlin begins to wonder if she might beat out Stella for the coveted position of Head Girl, a position Stella intends to claim as if by right. As the girls clash, Eve delves into their personalities, revealing secrets and hidden talents, along with hidden flaws. As Stella remembers her beloved older sister’s death, Caitlin must decide if she will abandon her pursuit of Head Girl in order to return to New York to see her beloved little brother. The decisions each makes regarding boys, sex, fashion and friendship may alter readers’ initial perceptions of the girls. The author makes deliberate reference to Great Expectations, writing Stella as a modern-day Estella, taught to break hearts. This time, however, the focus falls on the effect of that upbringing on Stella instead of on the boys she targets. A fizzy, fashionable, schoolgirl rivalry with depth. (Fiction. 12 & up)
THE LURE
Ewing, Lynne Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-06-220688-6 978-0-06-220690-9 e-book Gritty realism and airbrushed romance go head to head in this tale of life among Washington, D.C.’s street-wise gangs. Years after her best friend died in a drive-by shooting, Blaise seeks safety and protection by joining Core 9, a gang active in her downtrodden neighborhood. As their rite of passage, Blaise and Ariel opt for a severe beating rather than the gang rape Melissa endures. At the pinnacle of Core 9’s hierarchy is Trek, a handsome sadist whose favor is essential for survival. Desired by both Trek and her de facto boyfriend, Rico, virginal Blaise longs for Rico’s best friend, Satch. When Trek offers Blaise pay to use her feminine wiles to draw gangbangers out for Trek to kill or maim, Blaise, guided by pure motives a saint would envy, reluctantly agrees. She’s embarrassed but thrilled when Melissa’s makeover transforms her into a sleek seductress, but she’s sickened by the job itself. The girls of Core 9 are lovely; the guys handsome, muscular hotties who sell drugs but largely stick to beer. All, even Trek, are smart and self-aware, their families vicious or victimized. While some characters speak Spanish, none are identified by race or culture; ungrounded in cultural identity, characters feel generic. Skilled storytelling and starkly gripping details of gang life can’t paper over the contradictions: This is stylish gangster porn. (Fiction. 14 & up)
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DARE THE WIND The Record-Breaking Voyage of Eleanor Prentiss and the Flying Cloud Fern, Tracey Illus. by McCully, Emily Arnold Farrar, Straus and Giroux (40 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-0-374-31699-0
A lively, true story about a 19th-century woman and the 15,000-mile sailing journey she navigated. With animated language full of the vigor of the sea itself, Fern relates the story of Ellen Prentiss Creesy, who, while growing up in Marblehead, Mass., was taught to both sail and navigate by her sea-captain father. Later, Ellen accompanied her husband, also a sea captain, on many voyages as navigator. Ellen’s husband was given command of the Flying Cloud, a clipper ship whose 1851 maiden voyage—from New York City around the tip of Cape Horn to San Francisco—aspired to bring passengers and cargo to the Gold Rush more quickly than had ever been done before. With Ellen as navigator, the Flying Cloud endured storms and doldrums to triumph in its record-setting voyage. McCully’s expertly rendered watercolor illustrations evoke, in double-page spreads, the rich atmosphere of the sea in all its moods, while many events are shown as round vignettes— as though seen through a spyglass. Off-kilter horizon lines conjure up the motion of the ship at sea, and sailing-savvy readers will appreciate the accurate depiction of all things nautical. Endpapers showing the Flying Cloud’s sailing route orient readers to the huge scope of the voyage. As stimulating as sea air itself, this story will surely send the salt water coursing through the veins of its readers. (author’s note, glossary) (Picture book. 5-10)
UNDER THE EGG
Fitzgerald, Laura Marx Dial (256 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-0-8037-4001-3
This debut novel weaves art appreciation, restoration and dating techniques, and bits of history from the Renaissance and World War II into a fast-paced mystery. As the novel opens, 13-year-old Theodora Tenpenny explains her thrifty hobby of collecting trash from the city streets and turning it into useful objects. Then she recounts what happened merely three months ago: She found her adored grandfather, Jack, lying bloodied on a city street and heard his dying exhortation to “Look under the egg.” Theodora, who has spent her life living with her emotionally incapacitated mother and her crusty, artistic, capable grandfather, knows she must follow this clue in order to become the family’s next breadwinner. (Readers must suspend disbelief regarding social services in Manhattan.) |
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Fortuitously, Theodora befriends Bodhi, also 13 but a member of a family of Hollywood celebrities. Theodora’s knowledge of art history and Bodhi’s skills in acting and in technology enable the girls to puzzle out the importance of Jack’s final words. All the characters are relatively flat, including first-person protagonist Theodora, but an original plot with humorous swipes at rich-and-famous lifestyles and authentic references to New York City will keep readers interested. Occasionally, there are awkward or dense passages, but they are balanced by quirky encounters, as with Eddie, a tattooed librarian. If Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code wrote middle-grade novels, this would be the one. (Mystery. 9-13)
TIPPY-TIPPY-TIPPY, SPLASH!
Fleming, Candace Illus. by Karas, G. Brian Atheneum (40 pp.) $16.99 | $12.99 e-book | Mar. 25, 2014 978-1-4169-5403-3 978-1-4814-0028-2 e-book A dozen years since they first made an appearance, and not a day older or wiser, Fleming’s three young cottontails return to bedevil Mr. McGreely (Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!, 2002, etc.). The bunnies still have a few tricks up their sleeves to get under Mr. McGreely’s skin. Where once they ate his garden to the ground, now they are doing their unintended best to undermine his vacation, one he has taken expressly to get away from the “floppyeared, pufftailed twitchwhiskers.” They manage to stow away in his car, then happily join him on his beach towel. Mr. McGreely storms off to do some shell collecting (“No bunny—nohow, noway—is sharing my fun day”). He returns with paltry fragments that he is very proud of, only to find that the bunnies have found a trove of spectacular shells. His kite flies for two seconds—again, he’s very proud—while the bunnies paraglide with their kite, and so on. In the end, there is a message about teamwork, which is not to be ignored, but it is Fleming’s text that raises the bar of joy to such heights, with her quirky internal rhymes—“Tippy-Tippy-Tippy, grab!…Tippynab”—and descriptive language. Karas invests each character with acres of personality. It’s a happy reunion with the bunnies for children, if a dubious one for Mr. McGreely. (Picture book. 4-8)
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POEM DEPOT Aisles of Smiles
not wild action: “Sprinkle, twinkle, mix, and bake. / Love you more than / chocolate cake. // Sudsy, wudsy, splash, and laugh. / Love you more than bubbly bath.” A bit bland, but it conveys the two-way message without turning syrupy. (Picture book. 4-6)
Florian, Douglas Illus. by Florian, Douglas Dial (160 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 20, 2014 978-0-8037-4042-6
Gifted poet and illustrator Florian (Poem Runs: Baseball Poems, 2012, etc.) here presents a chunky collection of drawings and brief poems on a host of silly subjects. Posited as a superstore of verse on assorted topics children care about—school, family, animals, food and the like—one also can’t help thinking this “depot” represents a midway point for a number of poems that haven’t quite reached their creative destinations. To be truly effective, light or nonsensical verse should be as tight in its poetic construction as it is loosely suggestive in metaphorical associations, and a number of the works assembled here simply read as not fully cooked. The volume’s more successful poems tend to employ wordplay to elicit a chuckle or illustrate delightfully nonsensical truisms about language, as in “Insect Asides”: “A dragonfly is not a fly. / It’s not a dragon either. / No butter on a butterfly, / And bees cannot spell neither.” Likewise, when paired well, Florian’s free-form penand-ink drawings enhance the whimsical nature of the fanciful scenes depicted. In “Pets,” a creepy drawing of a girl with hairy spiders crawling all over her face offers a convincing explanation for the accompanying poem’s punch line: “Bruce has ten pet roosters. / Ben has ten pet hens. / Fran has ten tarantulas, / But not too many friends.” Overall, a thick collection of humorous verse that might have been funnier with thinner ambitions. (Poetry. 9-11)
LOVE YOU MORE THAN ANYTHING
Freeman, Anna Harber Illus. by Henry, Jed Sterling (24 pp.) $9.95 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-4549-0021-4
ALLIANCE
Frost, Mark Random House (352 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-375-87046-0 978-0-375-98002-2 e-book 978-0-375-97046-7 PLB Series: Paladin Prophecy, 2 Will West faces old and new adversaries during summer vacation in this sloppy sequel to The Paladin Prophecy (2012). Several months have passed since Will and his roommates defeated the Knights of Charlemagne, but many questions remain about the Knights, their ties to the monsters of the Never-Was and the disappearance of Will’s parents. A wealthy school donor emerges as a major player in the conspiracy, so Will and his friends develop a risky plan to use their extraordinary abilities—which include superspeed, telepathy and sonic power—to infiltrate and search his island home. Unfortunately, Frost’s everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink approach to worldbuilding doesn’t make more sense the second time around; even with a clumsy extended recap in the first chapter, the mix of secret societies, genetic manipulation, guardian angels and monsters from another dimension is hard to keep straight. The busy plot leaves little space for characterization. Will’s two romantic interests are particularly underdeveloped, making the love triangle feel perfunctory, and Will’s cross-country coach, Jericho, only appears when Will needs a convenient source of generic Native American mysticism and lore. When the obligatory cliffhanger ending comes, it’s hard to care what happens next. This muddled adventure won’t leave readers impatient for Book 3. (Adventure. 12-16)
Chipmunk parents and children display mutual attachment in this uncomplicated new entry in the teeming “I Love You More/So Much/This Much/Forever” genre. Anthropomorphic in dress and body proportions, a furry family sets out for a day of play and picnicking, followed by dinnertime, baths and bedtime. It’s all punctuated by hugs, nuzzles and affectionate glances. Suspended on spreads of blank creamy paper with just occasional food items or tufts of grass for detail, Henry’s smiling animal figures fly kites, make chalk drawings, relax on a checkered blanket and (in the parents’ case) look on fondly as the daylong idyll passes. Despite occasional inexact rhymes and words selected more for sound than relevance, the accompanying patterned couplets warmly reflect each picture’s mix of buoyant energy and happy but 100
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“References to fairy tales add depth to the story and make a clever backdrop to this series kickoff….” from operation bunny
OPERATION BUNNY The Fairy Detective Agency’s First Case Gardner, Sally Illus. by Roberts, David Henry Holt (192 pp.) $12.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-8050-9892-1 Series: Wings & Co., 1
Emily, an unloved orphan, finds a new family and occupation when she discovers her true calling. Emily Vole might only be 9, but she has lived quite a life. After being abandoned in a hatbox, she is adopted by the Dashwoods, a hedge fund manager and his social-climber wife. After the Dashwoods have triplets of their own, they force Emily into servitude. When she is rescued from her Cinderella life by her neighbor, Miss String, and a man-sized talking cat named Fidget, Emily’s life changes: She discovers that she is the new Keeper of the Keys. References to fairy tales add depth to the story and make a clever backdrop to this series kickoff, in which a Circe-like witch turns people into animals and lures fairies to their doom in a magical lamp. Roberts’ detailed, humorous black-and-white illustrations are a big step up from the normal chapter-book fare; the train station where Emily is discovered is dramatically drawn with crosshatched lines and a beam of light highlighting the hatbox, while later illustrations show Emily, with her wide, sad eyes, in the full squalor of her life with the Dashwoods. Now that Emily and her buddies have set up their new store and detective agency, readers looking for chapter books on the long side will look forward to more magical cases. (Fantasy. 7-12)
THE SECRET OF FERRELL SAVAGE
Gill, J. Duddy Atheneum (176 pp.) $15.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4424-6017-1 978-1-4424-6019-5 e-book A debut that reads like an early draft of a successful story of mild middle school drama. Ferrell Savage has been friends for years with neighbor Mary Vittles, but now that they are in middle school, he feels the relationship changing. Sweet, loyal Ferrell doesn’t mind Mary’s tendency to throw around SAT words or her ferocious competitiveness. That Mary’s entry in the Big Sled Race loses to a newcomer’s is bad enough, but that Ferrell’s spectacular wipeout garners him the most attention of all strains things further. That would be a perfectly fine premise for a book, but unfortunately, it’s not the premise for this book. No, this book’s premise is that Ferrell’s great-great-uncle was |
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an infamous (real-life) cannibal and Mary’s ancestor his victim (note their names—get it? Get it?). That’s his secret, but he doesn’t know it yet. (Readers do, thanks to the cover, and they have to endure a lot of obvious misdirection before Ferrell learns.) Complicating matters is the sled-racing newcomer, even more competitive than Mary, who threatens to air their terrible secret if they don’t agree to a rematch so winning will focus all attention on him. How does he know about Ferrell’s relative? Why does he care so much about it? Readers never learn. Tendentiously cute names (there’s also Bruce Littledood, Ms. Goodkind, Ms. Bland, Mr. Comfy and so on) distract more than they amuse. Strip the cannibalism, the clumsy, plot-driven characterization and the dopey names, and this could be quite a sweet story. (Fiction. 9-12)
UNACCOMPANIED MINOR
Gillespie, Hollis Merit Press (256 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 18, 2014 978-1-4405-6773-5
A laugh-out-loud thriller about family court, money laundering and skyjacking. Nobody can navigate an airport like April Mae Manning. Her deceased father was a pilot, her mother is a flight attendant, and her “lying, greedy, odious sociopath” of a stepfather is a pilot. With her mother in Atlanta and her stepfather in LA, MacGyver-loving April has logged some serious miles as an unaccompanied minor. Thanks to her insider knowledge, she can read a flight manifest and negotiate TSA lines like no ordinary civilian. This savvy stands her in good stead when she finds herself with best friend and fellow unaccompanied minor Malcolm, his emotional-support dog, a kindhearted cop escorting a crook and the crustiest flight attendant in history on an L-1011 with a bomb in its hold and a crew infiltrated with hijackers on board. The narrative takes the form of April’s report to the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board following the incident, and it’s laced with April’s trenchant commentary on the vagaries of family court and the inequities of the conditions of airline employment. Former flight attendant Gillespie’s insider knowledge infuses April’s account with confident authority. Her impeccable comic timing and command of April’s oh-so-15-yearold voice carry the plot through several unlikely but carefully laid-out contortions that will leave readers (and some of April’s friends) in stitches. A high-sky winner all the way from coast to coast. (Thriller. 12-16)
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“While much of the story is run-of-the-mill, the intense emotional upheaval Emrys experiences as she chooses between the life she has known and the man she loves will feel achingly real to empathetic readers.” from all that glows
STONE SOUP WITH MATZOH BALLS A Passover Tale in Chelm
Glaser, Linda Illus. by Tabatabaei, Maryam Whitman (32 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-8075-7620-5
A classic European fable goes to Chelm for Passover. A stranger arrives in Chelm, the folkloric town of noodleheads, and reminds its unwelcoming residents of the Passover custom: “All who are hungry come and eat.” The visitor insists that with only a stone and a large pot, he can make a delicious matzoh ball soup. Unimpressed yet willing to follow their own brand of logic, the townspeople bring forth water as the necessary initial ingredient. The stranger, cunning yet humble, boils the stone and produces a soup fit for himself, but for his hosts, perhaps a bit more might be needed? Salt, onions, garlic, carrots, celery and chicken are offered. However, Yenta, the wise woman, points out the lack of matzoh balls. The visitor promises that his stone can make matzoh balls “so big and heavy they’ll sit in your belly like rocks,” and, horrified, the cooks in Chelm provide their own matzoh balls, “so light they can almost fly.” The visitor’s culinary feat is now ready for the town’s communal Seder. A dark, almost gloomy palette of watercolors offers a drab late-wintry rather than budding-spring setting for its wide-eyed Eastern European peasants and their rabbiniclooking bearded visitor. Unfortunately, the looniness normally associated with Chelm is as muted as Tabatabaei’s illustrations. The missing ingredient for this conventional retelling is the characteristic foolishness of a Chelm-centered story. (Picture book. 4-7)
TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY From Concussion to Coma
Goldsmith, Connie Twenty-First Century/Lerner (88 pp.) $25.95 e-book | $34.60 PLB | Feb. 1, 2014 978-1-4677-2550-7 e-book 978-1-4677-1348-1 PLB Traumatic brain injuries are a major concern not only for those hurt in war and sports, but also in many other areas. Many of the headlines surrounding brain injuries have focused on football-related injuries, but this broad look at the topic makes clear there are many varieties that should demand attention. The person suffering could be an infant victim of shaken-baby syndrome or a soldier coping with the aftereffects of head injury from war, among other causes. Goldsmith provides basic information about the brain and the definition of TBI as well as explaining the different types of concussions. Individual chapters explore currently prominent themes, especially sports-related injuries, war wounds and damage caused 102
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by motor vehicle accidents. Even an event as common as falling down is examined. The exploration concludes with looks at coping with TBI and what might be on the horizon for research and treatment. A lot of ground is covered in this slim volume, but it is a solid introduction to the topic. It makes good use of graphics, photographs and sidebars to deliver complicated information. There is comprehensive backmatter: glossary, source notes, index, photo credits and selected bibliography, featuring only titles from the last few years. Particularly valuable is a section called “For Further Information,” with books, organizations and websites, suicide-awareness and -prevention sources, and videos. An efficient survey of a timely topic. (Nonfiction. 11-18)
ALL THAT GLOWS
Graudin, Ryan HarperTeen (480 pp.) $9.99 paper | $9.99 e-book Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-06-218741-3 978-0-06-218742-0 e-book A paranormal romance that’s notable for its Fae protagonist’s honest examination of what loving a mortal will cost her. When Emrys Léoflic is sent to London to guard the partying British prince Richard, she considers her reassignment to be a punishment from Queen Mab. What she doesn’t expect—though readers may—is her swift fall for the attractive, good-hearted Richard. Graudin sidesteps complete predictability with Emrys’ inner thoughts, which reveal her gradual acknowledgement of her true feelings for Richard and, later, her growing understanding of what a commitment to him will mean: the loss of her immortality and magic. Meanwhile, an ancient power threatens the safety of the entire royal family, desirous of the powerful blood magic they unwittingly possess. Emrys’ metaphor-heavy first-person narration chronicles the agony she endures in both deciding her own fate and attempting to protect Richard and his family from a veiled but powerful threat. While much of the story is run-of-the-mill, the intense emotional upheaval Emrys experiences as she chooses between the life she has known and the man she loves will feel achingly real to empathetic readers. Paranormal romance fans will come away with a heroine they can both root and care for. (Paranormal romance. 14-18)
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WHEN ELEPHANT MET GIRAFFE
Gude, Paul Illus. by Gude, Paul Disney Hyperion (56 pp.) $16.99 | Nov. 17, 2014 978-1-4231-6303-9
Loquacious Elephant meets her match in taciturn Giraffe in this debut picture book. Gude’s flat, cartoonish digital art depicts Elephant heading off for a swim in the first story, “The Water Hole.” When she greets the giraffe and tries to start up a conversation with him and is met only with silence, Elephant is both baffled and offended. She walks off in a huff but then turns to a book (All About Giraffes) to try to understand why he snubbed her. She learns that giraffes “don’t make much noise” and therefore accepts her new acquaintance’s reticent nature. This opens the door for them not only to share the water hole together, but to bake in a story called “Pretzels” and to play dress up in a story called “The Bossy Pirate.” Sly humor punctuates the stories, which inevitably center on conflict arising from the friends’ very different personalities. At first blush, the picture book reads like an early reader in some ways, with its discrete, tightly paced stories and odd-couple characters, but the vocabulary isn’t quite controlled enough to be accessible to independent emergent readers. A humorous picture book about two new, unlikely pals. (Picture book. 3-6)
LANDRY PARK
Hagen, Bethany Dial (384 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-8037-3948-2 Regency romance sits uneasily in a dystopian throwback future. Poor little rich girl Madeline Landry wants to go to university before marrying and inheriting one of America’s most important estates. Madeline’s world is an odd amalgam of romantic notions of history and dark, postwar future. The western half of the United States fell years ago to “China and her allies,” exotic faceless caricatures who smuggle “plum wine, opium, and jade” and who don’t fight like “civilized armies” but are “brutal” when they “swarm.” Meanwhile, the gentry’s entire society rests on its enslavement of the Rootless, a diseased underclass responsible for maintaining the nuclear power invented by Madeline’s own ancestor. From within the cozy confines of her silken prison, Madeline realizes that forcing children to dispose of spent uranium while providing only enough medical care for them to stay fertile is a little gauche. Along with a few interestingly complex secondary characters, Madeline learns about the caricatured evil underlying her luxuries. Will she be able to assuage her conscience by merely |
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scattering largesse to the populace out of a sense of noblesse oblige, or will she be forced to make any actual sacrifices? Regency romances can combine well with science fiction (Lois McMaster Bujold’s accessible adult novel A Civil Campaign (1999) does so brilliantly), but this awkward merger of the two will convince few. (Science fiction. 12-14)
HIDDEN GIRL The True Story of a ModernDay Child Slave Hall, Shyima with Wysocky, Lisa Simon & Schuster (240 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 21, 2014 978-1-4424-8168-8
This memoir of modern domestic slavery ends with hope and determination, as young author Hall (born Shyima El-Sayed Hassan) is “one of the fortunate 2 percent” to be freed from servitude. Shyima’s childhood in Egypt ends when her parents are blackmailed into turning over their 8-year-old daughter to a wealthy couple. Every day, Shyima cleans the five-story house and the 17-car garage, “standing on a stool doing the dishes” because she’s too tiny to reach the sink. When she’s 10, Shyima’s captors move to California, illegally trafficking her into the U.S. After two more years of hard labor and increasing ill health, a worried neighbor calls the police, and Shyima’s journey into freedom begins. A chain of Muslim and Christian foster parents (some protective, others exploitative) leads her to become an anti-slavery activist. Unsurprisingly, Hall’s representations of Arab and Muslim men are filtered through her appalling experiences. Though she acknowledges misogyny “is not what the Muslim faith is about,” readers should expect to find depictions that hew closely to negative stereotypes. Those readers prepared to brave a dense, adult tome could move from Hall’s memoir to John Bowe’s Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy (2007) for a deeper look. The proximity to pain makes for a choppy narrative but also vitally draws attention to a global crisis. (Nonfiction. 13-16)
PENGUIN IN PERIL
Hancocks, Helen Illus. by Hancocks, Helen Templar/Candlewick (32 pp.) $15.99 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-7636-7159-4 It is a truth universally acknowledged that cats in possession of a penguin must
be in want of fish. In this sprightly author-illustrator debut, three hungry red cats are inspired by a movie about fish-hunting penguins to steal one from the zoo and put it to work for them. As the cat |
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Art Trumps Commerce—This Time A respected publisher and a toy company join forces, and it actually works By Vicky Smith
Various representatives of Mattel and Little, Brown, all clad in smart suits, mingled with the guests. Then the “Newbery Honor author” appeared: Shannon Hale! Hale won her Newbery Honor in 2006 for the exquisite Princess Academy, which Kirkus hailed for the “precise lyricism” of its language. (Full disclosure: I was on that Newbery committee, and I am a confirmed fan of Shannon Hale.) She’s also written the lovely Books of Bayern series, which begins with Goose Girl, a reimagining of the Grimms’ tale of the same name; The Book of a Thousand Days, which relocates another Grimms’ tale to Mongolia; and, with her co-author husband, Dean Hale, and illustrator Nathan Hale (no relation), Rapunzel’s Revenge, a hysterical graphic novel that sets “Rapunzel” in the Wild West.
As book-launch events go, this was a rather odd one. Co-sponsored by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers and Mattel, it was held in the bowels of the Javits Center during Book Expo America earlier this year, and there were no books in sight. Invited guests were given a choice of heavily besprinkled doughnuts (strawberry: Royals; blueberry: Rebels), a book bag and a nifty little journal. Most of the people I recognized had no doubt been lured to the event by the “Newbery Honor author” dangled by the invitation—I certainly had—even as the “Mattel” part made us nervous. Munching my doughnut, I took my seat. At the front of the room was the expected presenters’ table, at the left of which were a set of dolls in bright packages. 104
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The event began. One of the Mattel reps talked about their new line of dolls: Ever After High. She used all sorts of words those of us in literary criticism and librarianship like to pretend don’t exist: “synergy,” “brand loyalty,” “market saturation.” The dolls are meant to expand on the success of previous Mattel/ Little, Brown collaboration Monster High but with a fractured-fairy-tale angle. The scenario: The next generation of fairy-tale characters are at boarding school and getting ready to pledge their destinies in the Storybook of Legends. The Royals (Snow White’s daughter, Apple White; Sleeping Beauty’s daughter, Briar Beauty; etc.) are eager to take up their parents’ mantles and live out their stories as written. But the Rebels, led by Raven Queen (daughter of the Evil Queen, of course), want to live their own lives and to write their own stories. As the Mattel rep said of this setup, “Who better than Shannon Hale?” Hale spoke briefly and enthusiastically about the project, stressing the amount of freedom she’d been given to develop the characters and place them in situations she hadn’t dreamed Mattel would approve. Clearly, she had a great time with it. Equally clearly, those of us in the room who like to believe that literature is all about Art were confused. Much as we might decry the marketing-driven approach to children’s books in general, we all really felt that if anyone could pull this off, it would be Shannon Hale. And, by golly, she does. In the first book in the Ever After High series, The Storybook of Legends, Hale takes a concept created by Madison Avenue and has a total blast. She weaves story elements that were no doubt required by Mattel—lots of descriptions of groovy dresses and frankly dopey character names, as well as the basic plot—into a frothy, funny and smart story. |
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Raven’s academic adviser is the witch Baba Yaga, whose cottage runs away from Raven into the pig field; Hunter routinely rips off his shirt to the sound of invisible trumpets whenever he feels pressed to go to the rescue; a Shrinking Potion takes effect with an accompanying scent of hot, buttered toast. And that’s not even looking at Hale’s effervescent verbs. Characters who don’t pledge their destinies “poof”; night “once-upons” instead of falling; a distressed Apple feels “cored.” Mystery and depth to come in subsequent books are heralded by the enigmatic Cerise Hood, around whom the Three Little Pigs become unaccountably anxious. . . . I don’t know that I will ever fall in love with the larger mission of Ever After High, which plainly aims to empty the pockets of as many preteen girls (or their parents) as humanly possible. This whole “synergy” thing makes me nervous. But those girls who buy into the Ever After High concept whole hog and actually read Hale’s book will have a high old time, and it’s really hard to be disgruntled about that. Vicky Smith is the children’s and teen editor at Kirkus Reviews.
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“Hawkes’ extra-charming soft-focus acrylic-and–colored-pencil artwork on textured paper suits the cactus-filled desert landscape to a T-for-Texas….” from meanwhile, back at the ranch
burglars bike through the city with the penguin in a box on their bicycle rack, “[t]he penguin began to sense that he was in peril.” As luck would have it, the brave bird breaks free and lands among a flock of nuns, blending right in with their black-andwhite habits. The cats don’t spot the penguin on the subway escalator behind the bowler-hatted man or in the restaurant (he looks like the tuxedo-sporting waiters), and so he makes his way back to the zoo “[j]ust in time for a fishy feast!” Justice is served with the help of a little bird who tips off the police: The cat gang is sent to jail for a lifetime of gruel. Graphic shapes in pencil and bold gouache colors not only make for striking compositions, they suggest humor in the simplest of ways. Clever details abound, like the underground map of the penguin’s escape via subway and the animals’ image-only dialogue bubbles. The penguin in peril prevails in this fresh and funny English import. (Picture book. 4-7)
THE WHITE HOUSE FOR KIDS A History of a Home, Office, and National Symbol, With 21 Activities House, Katherine L. Chicago Review (144 pp.) $16.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2014 978-1-61374-461-1
The latest installment in the For Kids series offers a biography of a house. “Even if you don’t know your best friend’s house number, chances are you know the address for the White House.” The premise may or may not be true nowadays, but young readers will certainly be drawn in by this kid-friendly approach to history. The story of the White House represents much of the history of the United States, and it’s fitting that a biography of a house be written by an author named House. From George Washington, who died before the White House was finished and thus never slept there, to Barack Obama playing basketball at the White House, this narrative of American history is chockfull of photographs, diagrams and sidebars. The series’ signature activities include how to write a letter to the president, make stilts (since Theodore Roosevelt’s children loved walking the house and gardens on stilts), bake Chelsea Clinton’s chocolatechip cookies and hold an egg race like the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House. Extensive backmatter includes lists of presidents and places to visits, Web resources and a bibliography, including a few sources for young readers. An engaging history of a country through the biography of its most famous dwelling. (Nonfiction. 8-12)
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MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH
Isaacs, Anne Illus. by Hawkes, Kevin Schwartz & Wade/Random (56 pp.) $17.99 | $20.99 PLB | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-375-86745-3 978-0-375-96745-0 PLB There’s nothing like the unexpected arrival of a millionaire widow to spur a stampede of Texas cowboys. In this terrific tall tale from the author of Swamp Angel (1994) and Dust Devil (2010), it looks like just about everyone is the marrying kind when a rich Englishwoman shows up: “Soon every unmarried man in Texas hoped to marry Tulip Jones—and in 1870, every man in Texas was unmarried.” One thousand suitors mean thousands of teatime pastries to fix, so Tulip hires Charlie Doughpuncher to help out. Day and night, the kind baker is there to comfort (and feed scones to) her suitored-out self. Desperate for some peace, Tulip finally concocts several challenges to clear out the gold-digging cowboys, from reversing the flow of the Rio Grande to collecting a pail of stars. But when her plan works, she’s all alone. Or is she? Lively storytelling in colorful, drawn-out sentences, Texas-style, makes for a splendid— albeit lengthy—read-aloud. Hawkes’ extra-charming soft-focus acrylic-and–colored-pencil artwork on textured paper suits the cactus-filled desert landscape to a T-for-Texas, and the caricatured faces of the snaggletoothed, bewhiskered, beyond-scruffy suitors are downright hilarious. True love is no tall tale in this delightfully overblown story of a plucky widow, a herd of greedy cowboys and a Texas summer so hot the chickens lay hard-boiled eggs. (Picture book. 5-8)
TIME FOR BED, FRED!
Ismail, Yasmeen Illus. by Ismail, Yasmeen Bloomsbury (32 pp.) $14.99 | $15.89 PLB | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-8027-3597-3 978-0-8027-3598-0 PLB A hilarious, not-ready-for-bed book starring Fred—an irrepressible and irresistible dog—and his diversionary tactics, in whose spirit parents and children will lovingly find the familiar. Fred is a bedtime-avoidance pro. When the clock chimes 8 o’clock, he’s off and up to his old antics. The owner’s affectionate yet exasperated remonstrations aptly capture a parent’s bedtime struggle, as Fred continues to hide and make mischief. He pretends a chair, laundry basket—and, yes, the parent’s bed!— is his own. At last, Fred’s asleep, tucked in to the appropriate bed. Playful illustrations in an autumnal palette will endear the pup to readers, as he gleefully climbs, digs and splashes through mud. Ismail applies her watercolors skillfully, capturing the precision of Leo Lionni’s collage work and the exuberance of Mary kirkus.com
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ICE DOGS
Blair’s palette. Each mark has an energy, purpose and thought to it. The sophisticated and loose artwork is the ideal match for the simple, emotive text. A perfectly designed read-aloud for the bedtime staller. A sheer delight! (Picture book. 1-5)
Johnson, Terry Lynn HMH Books (288 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-547-89926-8 In late winter in the Alaskan bush, a top junior dog sled racer loses her way in this thoroughly engaging and incredibly suspenseful survival story. The day after 14-year-old Victoria Secord places sixth in a race that qualifies her for the coveted White Wolf Classic, she hooks up her dogs and sets off for what she thinks will be a four-hour run covering an estimated 35 miles. She’s heard that a local competitor “may be getting out of dogs” and is determined to have first pick of his champion leaders. But things get out of hand quickly. She finds and rescues an injured snowmobiler (Chris, a city boy her age) and in her haste to get him home, takes an unfamiliar trail as a blizzard builds; they’re forced to spend that night (and more) outside. Johnson (Dogsled Dreams, 2010), a former musher, clearly writes from a deep well of experience. She admirably depicts the emotional life of a self-reliant, introspective and angry young musher mourning the loss of her beloved father, a trapper and river guide, who died in an accident 14 months earlier. Worried about dehydration, hypothermia, and food for both dogs and themselves, Vicky draws on memories of experiences with her dad to guide them. Though Chris’ ignorance of outdoor life often endangers them, their burgeoning, bantering friendship adds depth even as the well-paced suspense builds. Well-crafted, moving and gripping. (Adventure. 10-14)
SAMANTHA SUTTON AND THE WINTER OF THE WARRIOR QUEEN
Jacobs, Jordan Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (368 pp.) $6.99 paper | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-4022-7563-0 Series: Samantha Sutton, 2 Off on another expedition with her archaeologist Uncle Jay, 12-year-old Samantha Sutton is caught up in a plot to ruin his career. Unless her uncle’s excavations turn up valuable historic relics under Wardy Hill, its owner, Sir Cairn Catesby, plans to build a Roman-style theme park there, where locals believe legendary warrior-queen Boudicca lived and died, outside present-day Cambridge, England. As in series opener Samantha Sutton and the Labyrinth of Lies (2012), the archaeologist-author describes field research in loving detail, contrasting the careful work of scientists with the depredations of treasure hunters with metal detectors. But his depictions of the archaeological community, including Sir Cairn (a professor of archaeology at Cambridge) and Samantha’s own family, are far less positive. Her unreliable uncle makes enemies everywhere. They’re willing to sabotage his work and even threaten his niece and nephew. The suspense begins with an opening prologue: Samantha’s last desperate escape through a snowy night. As the events of the story unfold, there are peaceful moments—evensong at Kings College Chapel, rowing on the Cam in the early mornings, sharing the view from the chapel tower with new friend Graham Aubrey—as well as an increasing sense of danger. An enemy made in a previous story turns up again, and Samantha begins, not unreasonably, to fear for her life. An archaeological adventure with almost too much suspense. (Adventure. 10-14)
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Jordan, Sophie HarperTeen (384 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-06-223365-3 978-0-06-223366-0 e-book She’s tagged as a killer. But that’s not so bad. Beautiful, blonde, wealthy 17-year-old Davy Hamilton attends a posh private school in her Texas hometown and spends page after page mooning over her rugby-playing, Zac Ephron–esque boyfriend, Zac. All goes awry, however, when it’s discovered that she has Homicidal Tendency Syndrome, which means she could grow up to be a serial killer (!!!!!). She’s then whisked away from her school and social life and forced to attend a special juvielike school for students with the same diagnosis. At this point, readers might think that terrible things happen to Davy—that she could be put into terrifying danger or might struggle against her own genetic code. But no—she goes to class, slaps her exboyfriend, gets tattooed as punishment for acting out and pines after another hot boy in her new school. This nonthriller is packed with more overwrought, lusty musings than a Harlequin |
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romance. Some of the sentences actually work, while others are so preposterous they’ll have readers giggling: “Closing my eyes, I savor the sensation of Zac’s lips on my throat.” But there’s no vampire here, and there’s not that much action. And Davy comes off as a weak, whiny, boy-chasing protagonist who makes Bella look like Lara Croft. A schlocky bodice-ripper disguised as a dystopian romance. (Dystopian romance. 14 & up)
MAYBE ONE DAY
Kantor, Melissa HarperTeen (400 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 18, 2014 978-0-06-227920-0
A classic, youthful lament—“Why is this happening to me…? It’s so unfair”— avoids the maudlin and banal in the very capable hands of Kantor (The Darlings in Love, 2012, etc.). For rising juniors and lifelong friends Zoe and Olivia, the first shake-up—no more elite ballet company for them—was bad enough. But when leukemia strikes, a recalibration of the “worst thing that will ever happen” scale is required. Mirroring the harsh reality of modern-day cancer, hopes for Olivia rise and fall right along with blood counts, and a complete cure feels like it’s always just one procedure or experimental drug away. For Zoe, normal life goes on, with fundraising car washes, ditzy cheerleaders and a potential boyfriend distracting and complicating her days. How can she fall for Olivia’s crush? Should she tell her? Hit the party or the hospital? This high school drama goes well below the surface; faith is explored, and well-developed family members, friends and teachers play strong roles. These teens are not navigating life alone but are part of a supportive community. Readers just in it for the plot risk missing the poignant moments where Kantor’s strong, graceful writing captures the innocence and sophistication of youth and the hopes and the fears of the girls and their families. Teens, heartache and acute illness: The tears will flow. (Fiction. 13 & up)
THE OTHER WAY AROUND
Kaufman, Sashi Carolrhoda Lab (288 pp.) $17.95 | $12.95 e-book | Mar. 1, 2014 978-1-4677-0262-1 978-1-4677-2404-3 e-book Road-trip rebellion with romance. A sophomore at the mostly girls’ boarding school where his mother is headmistress, Andrew is not living up to his potential. Not that he’s cared about much of anything since his parents split up, but when pushed too far at Thanksgiving, he runs away from home. At the bus 108
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station, Andrew hooks up with an unusual group of young folks who are traveling in a van and living effectively hand to mouth with what they can muster from busking, Dumpster diving and handouts. With the Freegans, as they call themselves, he journeys from home in upstate New York to New Mexico. While it’s not a particularly new plot, the characters become compelling. There’s anarchist Lyle, who is hiding something. Pudgy Asian-American Tim is an odd addition to a troupe of acrobats. G, the lesbian who first approaches Andrew, is ironically the straightest of the bunch, while Jesse, the driver, leader and master of ceremonies, is always positive and inclusive. However, it’s Emily, with her blonde dreadlocks and bare stomach, who captures Andrew’s attention and lust. The dynamics of the group, combined with quirky characters met along the way, provide a certain fascination for both readers and Andrew. Readers captivated by the characters will have a chance to appreciate Andrew’s somewhat slow growth from a wimp with a dick into someone with a spine and a brain. Though it doesn’t blaze new trails, it’s an enjoyableenough ride. (Fiction. 12-16)
THE SOUND OF LETTING GO
Kehoe, Stasia Ward Viking (400 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 6, 2014 978-0-670-01553-5
“Change...is scary.” And family breakup is never easy. Learning that her parents plan to place her unpredictably violent autistic brother in a group home, accomplished trumpet player and responsible older sister Daisy Meehan experiments with bad behavior in her junior year in high school, trying to figure out how she feels about it. Is this freedom? Does she want it? The author of this moving story underscores her point as Daisy and exchange student Cal O’Casey work out a fictional autobiography of a newly freed slave for an AP history class. Has Daisy’s family been enslaved by her autistic brother, now big and frighteningly strong but still nonverbal? Will Cal, also a talented jazz musician, be a slave to his family’s business back in Ireland, or her old friend– turned-boyfriend Dave Miller to his family’s straitened circumstances? What does/would 13-year-old Steven want? As she ponders the dissolution of her own family, Daisy also considers her friends’ parents’ divorces. Families come apart in many ways and for many reasons, but in a small New Hampshire town, most everyone knows what’s going on. Written in short lines of free verse and short chapters, this accessible narrative moves along quickly and believably, ending satisfyingly without suggesting that all has been resolved. An intriguing medley of music, teen romance, high school life and serious family issues. (Fiction. 13-18)
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“The collective portrait that emerges from these narratives and pictures is diverse, complex and occasionally self-contradictory—as any true story should be.” from beyond magenta
A HOME FOR MR. EMERSON
Gandhi’s feet: “The Great Soul has come to Aslali.” The sense of something big is conveyed well, though the urgent need for change is only outlined. “Now my mother must buy her salt from the British,” explains the boy: The people “…are angry at the Raj; they are tired of the unfair laws.” Though so much more than salt was at stake, even the afterword, detailing the history of Gandhi’s nonviolent opposition to British rule, only hints at the full story. Ferri’s watercolor-and-pencil illustrations are full of warmth and immediacy—the young protagonist is on every spread. A gentle introduction to Gandhi’s remarkable work. (map, resource list). (Picture book. 4-8)
Kerley, Barbara Illus. by Fotheringham, Edwin Scholastic (48 pp.) $18.99 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-545-35088-4
The team behind creative picturebook biographies The Extraordinary Mark Twain (2010) and What To Do About Alice? (2008) turns its attention to 19th-century American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emersonian quotations adorn the pages and endpapers (“Every spirit builds a house, and beyond its house a world…. Build therefore your own world”), but the philosopher’s ideas and historical context are not the focus of this visually dynamic biography. Instead, this is largely the story of a natural scholar who loves his cozy home in Concord, Mass., so much that when it is damaged in a terrible fire, he mourns it like the death of a person. The illustrations—prancing across oversized pages— are cheery, inventive, bright and busy, depicting a contentedlooking man in coat and tails basking in the magnificence of life. In bold and whimsical spreads, Emerson literally dives into books, strides across a U.S. map and, most dramatically, looms as a silhouette amid the flaming ruins of his beloved house. It’s hard to say whether this tale will inspire children to further investigation into the philosopher’s life and work, but the author’s note does help round out the portrait, including Emerson’s friendships with Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott. A small, inviting window into the life of Ralph Waldo Emerson and an inspiring tribute to a life’s dream realized. (author’s note, philosophical prompts, source notes, acknowledgments) (Picture book/biography. 8-12)
BEYOND MAGENTA Transgender Teens Speak Out Kuklin, Susan Photos by Kuklin, Susan Candlewick (192 pp.) $22.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-7636-5611-9
Kuklin (No Choirboy, 2008, etc.) brings her intimate, compassionate and respectful lens to the stories of six transgender young people. In verbal and, when the subjects have given permission, visual profiles, readers meet transgender teens with a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. They hear from teens who identify fully as female or male, teens who identify as neither male nor female, and one teen who is intersex. Their stories are told largely in the teens’ own words, with only a few italicized interpolations to clarify or contextualize a point or to describe a facial expression or inflection readers cannot see or hear. In photographs, readers see Nat, who attends a performing-arts high school in New York City and uses the personal gender pronouns them and they, carrying their violin on New York’s High Line. Christina, who attends Fashion Institute of Technology, is pictured shopping for clothes, proudly displaying a school project and hugging her mother. Images of the young people before their transitions are often included but, appropriately, do not serve as focal points for their chapters. Similarly, sex and genitalia are discussed frankly but are rarely what matters most. The collective portrait that emerges from these narratives and pictures is diverse, complex and occasionally self-contradictory— as any true story should be. Informative, revealing, powerful and necessary. (author’s note, glossary, resource list) (Nonfiction. 12 & up)
A TASTE OF FREEDOM Gandhi and the Great Salt March
Kimmel, Elizabeth Cody Illus. by Ferri, Giuliano Bloomsbury (48 pp.) $17.99 | $18.89 PLB | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-8027-9467-3 978-0-8027-9470-3 PLB
An old man recalls the extraordinary time when, as a young boy, he joined an older brother in following Mahatma Gandhi on his long march to gather salt from the sea. Kimmel’s simple storytelling is pitched for quite young listeners. The boy’s awareness of powerful secrets and whispered conversations among his father and uncles fuels his interest in Gandhi’s arrival in his village. Gandhi plans to free India from British rule “without hitting or hurting the British soldiers,” and the boy wants to know how that could be done. Zaccheus-like, he climbs a tree to get a glimpse of the man leading more than 100 followers as people bow and throw flowers at |
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“Though Lee recounts the familiar French version in the text, beginning with the cover image, the illustrations affirm the beauty of this lithe girl of African descent and even of her mean-spirited sisters.” from beauty and the beast
ALIENATED
Landers, Melissa Hyperion (352 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4231-7028-0 A charming if lightweight sciencefiction romance bogs down when it attempts to convey moral lessons. High school senior Cara Sweeny plans on being the best at everything—schoolwork, debate, life. These ambitions earn her the ambiguous honor of hosting one of the first “exchange students” from the L’eihrs, the aliens who have just initiated contact with Earth. But while Aelyx might be completely humanlooking (and a total hottie), he’s also cold and arrogant, with a major hatred for all of humanity. The alternating viewpoints convey their personalities well: Cara’s is breezy and chatty and studded with slightly dated slang; Aelyx’s more formal, occasionally gloomy and often bewildered. Although there seems little beyond raging hormones to inspire their intense devotion, the romantic shenanigans are entertaining until overshadowed by the heavy-handed, simplistic message that prejudice is wrong—a moral somewhat undercut by the reliance upon such stereotypes as the temperamental redhead, the bigoted jock and the vivacious Latina who sprinkles her conversations with Spanish obscenities. Once the tone abruptly shifts to science-fiction thriller, the willing suspension of disbelief snaps under the weight of unbelievable behavior, nonsensical science and a “happy ending” with profoundly disturbing implications. It’s still rather fun in an after-school–special sort of way, but hardly an essential purchase or read. (Science fiction. 12-18)
PHILIP REID SAVES THE STATUE OF FREEDOM
Lapham, Steven Sellers; Walton, Eugene Illus. by Christie, R. Gregory Sleeping Bear Press (36 pp.) $16.99 | Dec. 1, 2013 978-1-58536-819-8 A slave in Washington, D.C., has the expertise to make possible the casting in bronze of the statue atop the Capitol Building. As a child, Reid learned to work with clay and wood from an older slave on a plantation in South Carolina. Sold to Clark Mills, a sculptor, Reid mastered the skills required to create bronze statues. When Mills was commissioned to cast the plaster mold of the Statue of Freedom in 1859, he took Reid with him. To everyone’s consternation, the plaster model was in one piece, and the Italian craftsman responsible for this wanted more money to disassemble it into its constituent parts. It was Reid who carefully determined where the seams were so that the mold could be separated and moved to a foundry to be cast. During the Civil War, the statue was placed on the Capitol dome, and slaves in the District of Columbia were granted 110
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emancipation. Paperwork from Reid’s owner requesting promised payment for his manumitted slaves is reproduced on the endpapers. Lapham and Walton invent dialogue in their narration, but they make Reid’s work exciting and provide a good picture of what little is known of him. Christie’s paintings are characteristically powerful, more impressionistic than realistic. Sources and further reading would have been a plus. A good introduction to the growing knowledge of the vital role slaves played in building Washington, D.C. (epilogue, authors’ note) (Picture book. 4-7)
THE ESCAPE
Lasky, Kathryn Scholastic (240 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-545-39716-2 978-0-545-63346-8 e-book Series: Horses of the Dawn, 1 Born in the hold of a Spanish galleon destined for the New World, the young filly Estrella knows nothing of the feel of the earth under her hooves or the joy of the pasture, but her mother’s soft murmurings hint at a greater destiny for the young horse and her friends. Determined to lighten their load and save their quest for gold, the sailors dump the horses overboard. Perlina, Estrella’s dam, exhorts them to swim for the nearby island, but a hungry shark has other plans for her filly. Perlina sacrifices herself for the herd, but her life is not her only gift. Before dying, she gives Estrella a vision of freedom. It falls to Estrella, the youngest of the surviving horses, to inspire the others to journey toward the promise of a life without masters where the sweet grass grows. As in works such as her Guardians of Ga’hoole series, Lasky uses animals to touch on very human issues. The herd must face the cost of freedom and the adversity that comes with the pursuit of one’s dreams. Complex and distinctive characters offer a fresh view of familiar historical events. A promising start to a new series. (author’s note, map) (Historical fantasy. 8-12)
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
Lee, H. Chuku Illus. by Cummings, Pat Amistad/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $17.99 | Feb. 1, 2014 978-0-688-14819-5 A brown-skinned Beauty—what a refreshing change! Cornrows, braids and beads, Afro puffs and twists. No, it’s not an African-American hair magazine; these are some of the hairstyles that Beauty and her sisters sport in Cummings and Lee’s ethnically rich retelling of an old, typically Caucasian favorite. The Beast’s family crest, an intricate figure on the title kirkus.com
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page that strongly resembles a West African Adinkra symbol, sets the stage for this picture book’s all-black cast of characters. Though Lee recounts the familiar French version in the text, beginning with the cover image, the illustrations affirm the beauty of this lithe girl of African descent and even of her mean-spirited sisters. Cummings’ illustrations convey so much detail that even the pre-transformation Beast seems beautiful…in his own way. Because of these culturally specific visual dynamics, the handsome visage of Beast-turned-prince comes as no surprise. Readers who attend to detail will delight in the Beast’s fierce animal topiaries and in a plethora of beastly faces found in unlikely places such as the backs of chairs, masks hanging on the walls and the cedar chest in Beauty’s room. This lovely reimagining of an old tale affirms the browning of American’s contemporary young readership. (Picture book. 4-8)
TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR KISSING GLORIA JEAN
Leigh, Britt Pauline Teen (192 pp.) $8.95 paper | Jan. 1, 2014 978-0-8198-7491-7
A 14-year-old girl tries to follow her Catholic faith but wants to get her first kiss too. Gloria Jean likes Connor, but on her first date with him she has a bout of the Troubles, an ailment that requires embarrassing emergency trips to the bathroom at awkward times. Connor’s not the only boy around, though; she meets another boy, Ian, in her Confirmation classes. In fact, she learns more about the ethics of kissing from her Confirmation classes than from the sex-ed class she takes at school. She goes through a minor rebellion when she learns that her Troubles are caused by celiac disease, which means that she will no longer be able to take the host in Communion. Wondering why the church requires wheat to be used in the host, she investigates. Even as Gloria Jean breaks a few rules in her anger and frustration, she nevertheless comes across as a basically good and sincere girl. Leigh titles each chapter with an amusing “Commandment” for kissing and writes convincingly from inside the head of her main character, who comes across as a fully realized adolescent. She presents a credible portrait of teen friendships and their angst over romance. A nicely balanced, believable and interesting view into adolescence, sex education and the power of faith. (Fiction. 11-14)
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THOMAS THE TOADILLY TERRIBLE BULLY
Levy, Janice Illus. by Slavin, Bill; Melo, Esperança Eerdmans (34 pp.) $17.00 | Feb. 5, 2014 978-0-8028-5373-8 The serious topic of bullying gets a light treatment in this tale of limited social skills and accidental friendship. The brisk introduction of Thomas, a newcomer to town, may leave readers, like his new acquaintances, cold. Cocky, pushy and clearly impatient, Thomas quickly decides that if his first approach doesn’t work, he’ll “be a bully instead.” Unfortunately, he’s just not cut out for the role. In what feels like an almost obligatory humorous pose, Thomas is shown peering into a mirror wearing only his tighty whities and bemoaning his flabby abs. Frustrated and determined, Thomas waits for someone truly puny to pick on only to discover that another, much bigger bully has gotten there first. Put into the position of defending young Gomer (and himself), Thomas thinks fast and deflects the danger. Paintings in acrylics on gessoed paper have a pleasingly textural look, well-suited to the warty characters and woodland setting. Bright pops of blue, purple and red contrast with the mossy greens and browns that dominate many of the illustrations. The appearance of a bug-eyed fly throughout provides additional interest. Unfortunately, none of this quite manages to compensate for the slim storyline and pat resolution. Like Thomas himself, Levy seems intent on sabotaging her own effort to connect and find a warm welcome. (Picture book. 4-7)
FRAGILE SPIRITS
Lindsey, Mary Philomel (320 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 23, 2014 978-0-399-16186-5
The formulaic plot of Shattered Souls (2011) continues in this companion novel. Although this book can stand on its own, quick recaps refresh returning readers and educate new ones on the roles and reoccurring lives of Speakers, who help Hindered and Malevolent spirits (Hindereds that have turned evil) to move on, and the Protectors who assist them. While Lenzi and Alden make return appearances, this story focuses on Alden’s former mentee, Paul Blackwell, and his first “cycle” as a Protector. Once again, romance turns troubling when rule-oriented Paul is paired with Vivienne, a rebellious, pink-haired Speaker. Given that they work together in such proximity lifetime after lifetime, it’s only natural that Protectors and Speakers form a special bond. But how will Paul and Vivienne even develop a viable working relationship when both teens have secrets that could leave them vulnerable? As in the |
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first novel, the only action occurs in the few encounters with lingering Hindereds. The climax builds with the return of the vengeful Malevolent, Smith, a court martialed Civil War soldier, but the resolution takes so long to settle that some readers may lose interest. Even Paul and Vivienne’s romance is more of a flicker than a flame. For die-hard paranormal fans only. (Paranormal romance. 13 & up)
BITE-SIZED MAGIC
Littlewood, Kathryn Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (432 pp.) $16.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-06-208426-2 978-0-06-208428-6 e-book Series: Bliss, 3 Picking up where A Dash of Magic (2013) ended, inimitable Rosemary Bliss pits her baking skills against the Mostess Snack Cake Corporation, which is intent on world domination through bite-sized cakes infused with magical ingredients. After defeating her nefarious aunt, Lily Le Fay, in the Gala des Gâteaux Grands baking contest and recovering the Bliss family’s Cookery Booke, 12-year-old Rosemary emerges “the most famous baker in all the world.” Now that she’s home in Calamity Falls, paparazzi make Rosemary’s life unbearable, prompting her to wish she “never had to bake again,” a wish she regrets when a bizarre new law closes the Bliss Family Bakery. Then she’s kidnapped by Mostess’ owner, Mr. Butter, who forces her to perfect recipes for his snack cakes, designed to enslave America. Determined to undermine Butter’s sinister plan by secretly devising antidotes, Rosemary finds her baking talents sorely tested, even with help from a clever cat, a musical mouse and her zany brothers. As in the earlier Bliss novels, slapstick action revolves around Rosemary’s experiments with outrageous recipes from the Cookery Booke, to the delight of all. Spot art highlights story themes. Bliss fans will revel in more improbable baking feats, comic action, exaggerated characters and outlandish ingredients in this latest delicious addition. (Fantasy. 8-12)
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LOST IN BERMOODA
Litwin, Mike Illus. by Litwin, Mike Whitman (144 pp.) $14.99 | Mar. 1, 2014 978-0-8075-8718-8 Series: Welcome to Bermooda, 1 In the cow paradise of Bermooda the only things to fear are the legendary monsters known as hu’mans. Chuck is bored, so bored that for excitement he is willing to explore the Boneyard, site of the crash 300 years ago of the HMS Hortica, which brought cows to Bermooda. (In Bermooda, “cow” does not appear to be a gendered term.) There, Chuck rescues a strange creature floating on an orange ring…and it turns out to be a hu’man, only without the claws, teeth and fire breath Chuck’s been told to expect. Chuck befriends Dakota and promises to get him back to his family. The duo make a cow suit that, astonishingly, fools everyone into believing Dakota is a cow. None of Chuck’s ideas to get Dakota home work, but in the planning, they discover a puzzling mystery that comes to a head at the Boomflower Festival. Can they solve it and keep Dakota’s identity a secret? Litwin’s light tale of friendship is full of Hawaii-inspired cow puns and reads like the intro to a series, since it introduces a large cast of characters, few of whom get to do much. Chuck and Dakota are nicely rounded characters, and the promised illustrations look to be endearingly cartoony. New-to-chapters readers will gladly join the herd and say “Lo’hai” (hello) to Bermooda and its denizens. (Fantasy. 6-10)
A SNICKER OF MAGIC
Lloyd, Natalie Scholastic (320 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-545-55270-7 978-0-545-55272-1 e-book The protagonist of this debut joins a growing list of endearing young girls from the South, and it’s an extra bonus that her new best friend and mentor is a boy whose method of transportation, without fanfare, just happens to be a wheelchair. Felicity Juniper Pickle, her little sister, Frannie Jo, and their dog, Biscuit, have once again been moved by their mother to a new town. This time they are moving in with Mama’s sister in Mama’s old hometown, Midnight Gulch, Tenn., which used to be renowned for its magic—the kind where people could “sing up thunderstorms and…dance up sunflowers.” Felicity, who has an uncanny ability for seeing and using written words but suffers from stage fright, wants to stay in Midnight Gulch. Her new friend, Jonah, with whom she performs anonymous acts of kindness, persuades Felicity to enter the Duel—a talent show in which her “weapon” will be her words. As the Duel approaches, kirkus.com
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“John narrates his story in fluid, lyrical prose, Loftin blending the raw realism of a boy who makes the wrong choice with the fairytale magic of a girl with a nightingale voice.” from nightingale’s nest
Felicity and Jonah find themselves caught up in figuring out how to return the town’s magic and to reverse a curse from Felicity’s “balloon-riding, globe-trotting, curse-bearing great-great-grandfather” (surely homage to Holes). Although pacing is sometimes difficult, this tale offers all the other earmarks of fine storytelling, including colorful, eccentric characters, an original, highly likable narrator and a mighty “spindiddly” plot. (Fantasy. 8-13)
TAKING CARE OF MAMA RABBIT
Lobel, Anita Illus. by Lobel, Anita Knopf (24 pp.) $11.99 | $14.99 PLB | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-385-75368-5 978-0-385-75369-2 PLB Who can make Mama Rabbit feel better? Mama Rabbit’s 10 little ones are worried when she feels too poorly to get out of bed. She assures them that their Papa has gone to fetch medicine, but these caring bunnies don’t wait idly by for their father’s return; instead, in a narrative that feels akin to DuBose Heyward and Marjorie Flack’s Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes (1939), each little kit offers Mama a gift to help her recover as she rests. By the time Papa comes back with the medicine, Mama doesn’t need it, since her children’s efforts have worked to make her feel better. Then the 10 little rabbits put on a show for their parents, complete with top hats and carrots. While the story is a bit slim, the conceit of a role reversal that finds children caring for a parent feels fresh, and Lobel’s soft style and Easter-egg palette of gouache and watercolors create a gentle and inviting lapine world. As always with Lobel, the treats are in the details. One by one, each little bunny finds something to comfort Mama with (a handkerchief, an apple) in a medallion at the top of the page and below bestows it, in a larger, rectangular illustration. Sharp-eyed children will notice that the bags under Mama’s eyes smooth out and she sits up straighter with each gift. A sweet little family tale. (Picture book. 2-5)
NIGHTINGALE’S NEST
Loftin, Nikki Razorbill/Penguin (256 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 20, 2014 978-1-59514-546-8
who was killed when she fell from a tree, and blames himself for not catching her. His financially strapped father drinks too much, and his mother’s depressed. Clearing brush near the Emperor’s house, John hears magical singing that “seep[s] right through” him like “a honey-soft river of sound.” Unsure if it’s a bird or a girl, he discovers a fragile, ethereal, birdlike 8-year-old girl named Gayle perched in a sycamore tree. John instinctively wants to protect Gayle from her foster mother, from her precarious living conditions (a twig nest) and from the Emperor, who offers John $500 to convince her to sing for him so he can record her perfect voice. To help his parents, John betrays Gayle with nearly disastrous results. John narrates his story in fluid, lyrical prose, Loftin blending the raw realism of a boy who makes the wrong choice with the fairy-tale magic of a girl with a nightingale voice. Unusual, finely crafted story of loss, betrayal and healing. (Magical realism. 8-12)
FROGGY GETS A DOGGY
London, Jonathan Illus. by Remkiewicz, Frank Viking (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 6, 2014 978-0-670-01428-6
Froggy returns for another minor adventure in his well-documented life with this 23rd outing. This time, Froggy wants to get a dog. His mother reluctantly agrees to the idea of a pet, though she thinks a dog would be too messy. After breakfast, Froggy, his mother and baby sister Pollywogilina set off together for the animal shelter, where they examine different kinds of pets. His mother suggests a bunny, white mice or even a baby alligator. But Froggy craves a canine companion, and he falls in love with a gray dog with “sweet chocolate brown eyes” that even his mother finds irresistible. They take the dog home, and as Froggy learns how to care for Doggy, he discovers that supervising a bouncy dog is not as easy as he first thought. The text is not particularly funny, offering a couple of stale setups with a pooper-scooper, as well as an episode in which Doggy drags out Mom’s pink underpants in front of Froggy’s friend Frogilina. Cheery illustrations in watercolor and pencil do their best to add to the humor with amusing expressions on the characters’ faces and jaunty poses that capture Froggy’s confident personality. Die-hard Froggy fans may enjoy his latest small adventure, but this doesn’t offer anything new in the crowded let’s-get-a-dog pack. (Picture book. 3-7)
A kindhearted Texas boy finds his life transformed by an enigmatic girl whose singing has the power to heal in this novellength spin on Andersen’s “The Nightingale.” Twelve-year-old “Little” John’s father works for the “Emperor,” the wealthy owner of a chain of dollar stores. John grieves for his little sister, |
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“As deceptively quiet in tone as its New Hampshire lakeside setting, this affecting book affirms the power of art as it tackles profound issues of loss, memory, aging, belonging and the inevitability of change.” from half a chance
HALF A CHANCE
Lord, Cynthia Scholastic (224 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-545-03533-0 978-0-545-62083-3 e-book As deceptively quiet in tone as its New Hampshire lakeside setting, this affecting book affirms the power of art as it tackles profound issues of loss, memory, aging, belonging and the inevitability
of change. Twelve-year-old narrator Lucy has moved again, and her famous nature-photographer father, whose attention she seeks, is traveling again. She meets boy-next-door Nate, whose grandmother Lilah is descending into dementia. This may be Lilah’s last summer at the lake; her family struggles with her care and the impending changes. When Lucy discovers that her father is judging a kids’ photography contest, she decides to enter, spending the summer taking pictures and tracking the loon population with Nate. Lucy takes a picture of Lilah that captures the old woman’s terrible panic. She knows Nate would not want her to submit the photo; her father, however, would value the truth it captures. As Lucy’s dad has taught her, “Even in the midst of horrible things, there are little bits of wonder, and all of it’s true.” Both the loons and photography become metaphors for the mutability of life and the importance of savoring captured moments. Nate and Lucy’s sweet budding romance will appeal to preteens. With winning results, Lord brings the same sensitivity to the subject of dementia that she brought to autism in her Newbery Honor book, Rules (2006). (Fiction. 8-12)
JUST JAKE
Marcionette, Jake Illus. by Villa, Victor Rivas Grosset & Dunlap (160 pp.) $11.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-448-46692-7 Series: Just Jake, 1
Sixth-grader Jake Mathews’ popularity has just fallen “off a cliff and [sunk] to the bottom of the ocean.” That’s what happens when your dad gets a new job and you’re forced to change schools in the middle of the year. Despite his frequently asserted “AWESOMENESS,” the move from Florida to Maryland is a blow to Jake’s seemingly unshakable self-confidence. But despite an older sister with a propensity for going ballistic and an intimidating search for a regular lunch table, Jake is determined to make the steep climb back up the social ladder. This high-concept middle-grade novel appears to be aimed directly at fans of series like Diary of a Wimpy Kid (his new school’s Kinney Elementary). Jake’s firstperson narrative looks and feels like a sixth-grader’s real-time 114
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memoir, complete with water stains, doodles and examples of Jake’s signature Kid Cards. Though Jake’s bravado is grating at first, readers will easily relate to his desire to fit in and avoid the social land mines that litter most middle school landscapes. Unfortunately, readers are only given a brief introduction to the band of “Misfit Toys” that Jake ultimately befriends. The novel would have benefited had Jake spent a little less time on his own awesomeness and a little more time letting readers get to know his new posse. It’s an eye-catching read without a whole lot of depth. (Fiction. 9-12)
BOK! BOK! BOOM!
Marko, Cyndi Illus. by Marko, Cyndi Branches/Scholastic (80 pp.) $15.99 | $4.99 paper | $4.99 e-book Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-545-61064-3 978-0-545-61063-6 paper 978-0-545-61392-7 e-book Series: Kung Pow Chicken, 2 Fowladelphia is under attack by Dr. Screech. Can Kung Pow Chicken save the day? Gordon Blue may appear to be an average, ordinary secondgrade chicken, but not long ago, he and his brother, Benedict, fell into a vat of toxic sludge in their uncle’s lab and emerged with superchicken powers. Gordon and Benny now have secret superidentities: Kung Pow Chicken and Egg Drop. In series opener Let’s Get Cracking (2014), they put Granny Goosebumps away for her evil plot to make money off of featherless chickens. Now, they have to keep their secret identities secret (especially from their mom), and nosy reporter Sam Snood is trying to expose them. When opera singer Honey Comb is chicken-napped by Dr. Screech during a performance, Kung Pow and Egg Drop crack into action. Dr. Screech gets away. Unfortunately, Sam Snood snaps some pictures and insinuates that Kung Pow is in cahoots with Dr. Screech! The boys have to enlist Uncle Quack’s help to hunt down the nefarious evildoer. Can they save the opera and Fowladelphia and clear their names? Marko’s second of four Kung Pow Chicken high-interest, fast reads for the just-ready-for-chapters reader continues Gordon’s adventures nicely, with plenty of punny action in the colorful mix of comic panels and short paragraphs of text. Fans will be glad Kung Pow has at least two more adventures on the way. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 5-7)
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ROCKY ZANG IN THE AMAZING MR. MAGIC
McDonald, Megan Illus. by Madrid, Erwin Candlewick (64 pp.) $12.99 | $4.99 paper | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-7636-5716-1 978-0-7636-7028-3 paper Series: Judy Moody and Friends Judy Moody for new readers is a miss. The original Judy Moody’s target audience is new chapter-book readers, and there, she is a queen. In a new format aimed at newly independent readers, Judy is back with familiar characters: the titular Rocky Zang and, in a simultaneously publishing companion, Jessica Finch (Jessica Finch in Pig Trouble; 978-0-7636-7027-6). Both stories follow a similar plot trajectory—the main characters have a big idea (fledgling magician Rocky wants to work with Judy as his assistant, and pig-crazy Jessica wants a pot-bellied pig for her birthday) that falls flat when misunderstandings among Judy and her pals get in the way. Here, Rocky perfects a hidden-dollar trick that makes Judy mad. The back-cover copy assigns this book to ages 4-6, which is quite a stretch, especially in the occasional spreads in which text fills an entire page. The vocabulary can be a challenge, likely to frustrate the just-beginning reader. On just one page, readers must tackle assistant, clenched, amazing, Supersonic and Switcheroo, words that gear the title to a slightly more experienced audience. Fans will also be disappointed by the new illustrations. Gone are Peter Reynolds’ deft, humorous lines, and here is Judy looking very different in brilliant full color. Fans tend to love things just the way they are, making this attempt to extend the brand down of questionable wisdom. (Early reader. 6-8)
LUMINARY
McGee, Krista Thomas Nelson (320 pp.) $9.99 paper | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-4016-8874-5 Series: Anomaly Trilogy, 2 This simplistic dystopia delivers formulaic romance and a large dose of religious faith. In the second installment of the Anomaly Trilogy, naïve musician Thalli and her friends, newly escaped from the evil Scientists and the underground State (Anomaly, 2003), arrive at New Hope, a small agricultural community that survived the Nuclear War 40 years ago. But alas, New Hope finds itself constantly threatened by Athens, a whole city that survived the War largely by developing never-described, constantly mentioned “pharmaceuticals.” Thalli goes to Athens to convince evil King Jason not to attack and meets his son, Alex, who seems like a nice guy. Sadly, Alex turns on a dime into a threatening |
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character. Thalli feels certain that she can escape if she relies on the Designer (apparently the future name for God). McGee appears to have two goals here: to write an entertaining dystopian novel and to promote religious faith. She mostly meets her first goal, although frequent sudden storyline reversals, such as Alex’s transformation, can cause whiplash. She relies, clearly intentionally, on frequent deus ex machina plot turns to promote the second goal. The roughly third-grade-level prose, dialogue that mostly avoids contractions, avoidance of necessary description and cardboard-cutout characterizations seem to pitch the book toward an expected audience of poor readers. The faithful may enjoy it. (Dystopian romance. 10-14)
WILDWOOD IMPERIUM
Meloy, Colin Illus. by Ellis, Carson Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (608 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-06-202474-9 978-0-06-211964-3 e-book Series: Wildwood Chronicles, 3 Drawing from wildly original tropes and paradigms and populated by a wide cast of characters old and new, this portrait of a magical world just outside mundane reality (here represented by Portland, Ore.) brings the trilogy to a satisfying conclusion. The opening strikes a somber note as a teenage girl calls up a restless spirit then lightens, turning to Prue and her quest: bringing together toymakers Carol and Esben to rebuild their remarkable mechanical boy. But first, Rachel, Elsie and the valiant Unadoptables must rescue Carol and Martha from the Titan tower, a fiendishly complicated task that depends on the now highly unstable Joffrey Unthank and the Chapeaux Noirs, an “anarcho-syndicalist” collective. Dramatic shifts in tone and mood—by turns politically astute and subversively witty, elegiac, droll and philosophical—are par for the course, while narrative style ranges from intimate to intergalactically distant. These idiosyncrasies make it just about impossible to identify the prospective audience by age. Never mind. Series fans know what awaits, and new readers will quickly determine if it’s for them. Interwoven with Meloy’s compellingly visual word portraits, Ellis’ abundant illustrations, including color plates, again showcase her subtle blend of folk-art simplicity and eldritch imagery. Like filmmaker Terry Gilliam, Meloy gives his antic imagination full rein to produce work that, if occasionally uneven, is brilliantly sui generis. (Fantasy. 10 & up)
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I AM AMELIA EARHART
Meltzer, Brad Illus. by Eliopoulos, Christopher Dial (40 pp.) $12.99 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-8037-4082-2 Series: Ordinary People Change the World The ever-popular pioneering female pilot gets a breezy and very incomplete biography. Meltzer gives Amelia a first-person voice and, in a very sketchy narrative laced with comic-book speech bubbles, presents her as a dare-devil tomboy. The flying bug hits her when she goes up for a flight with Frank Hawks at the age of 23. She tries her hand at different jobs to earn money for flying lessons; Meltzer, writing too glibly, calls stenography, one of those failed efforts, a “fancy-schmancy word.” As Amelia makes her solo trans-Atlantic flight, she shouts, “This is AWESOME!”—a word no doubt intended to resonate with contemporary readers but unlikely to have occurred to Earhart at the moment. The text concludes with an exhortation to “Never let anyone stop you. / Whatever your dream is, chase it. / Work hard for it.” There is nary a mention of her final, disastrous around-theworld flight and disappearance over the Pacific. Eliopoulos’ digitally rendered art is cartoon in style, with Earhart resembling a bobblehead doll and wearing an aviator hat and goggles. The audience for this mixed-up comic/bio is not at all clear. Given its incomplete information and lack of source material (an actual quote from Earhart is unreferenced), there is no justifying calling it a biography. Nor is there enough entertainment to call this a comic book. Skip. (photographs) (Picture book. 3-6)
I AM ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Meltzer, Brad Illus. by Eliopoulos, Christopher Dial (40 pp.) $12.99 | Jan. 14, 2014 978-0-8037-4083-9 Series: Ordinary People Change the World Our 16th president is presented as an activist for human and civil rights. Lincoln resembles a doll with an oversized head as he strides through a first-person narrative that stretches the limits of credulity and usefulness. From childhood, Abe, bearded and sporting a stovepipe hat, loves to read, write and look out for animals. He stands up to bullies, noting that “the hardest fights don’t reveal a winner—but they do reveal character.” He sees slaves, and the sight haunts him. When the Civil War begins, he calls it a struggle to end slavery. Not accurate. The text further calls the Gettysburg ceremonies a “big event” designed to “reenergize” Union supporters and states that the Emancipation Proclamation “freed all those people.” Not accurate. The account concludes with a homily to “speak louder then you’ve ever spoken before,” as Lincoln holds the 116
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Proclamation in his hands. Eliopoulos’ comic-style digital art uses speech bubbles for conversational asides. A double-page spread depicts Lincoln, Confederate soldiers, Union soldiers, white folk and African-American folk walking arm in arm: an anachronistic reference to civil rights–era protest marches? An unsourced quotation from Lincoln may not actually be Lincoln’s words. Successful neither as biography nor sermon. (photographs, archival illustration) (Picture book. 4-7)
THE WORLD OF MAMOKO IN THE YEAR 3000
Mizielinska, Aleksandra; Mizielinski, Daniel Illus. by Mizielinska, Aleksandra; Mizielinski, Daniel Big Picture/Candlewick (16 pp.) $17.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-7636-7125-9 In this companion to Welcome to Mamoko (2013), the wordless, hunt-andfind scenes depict the next millennium. Only the settings are futuristic, however; the daily dramas are universal. The opening spread names 32 animals and extraterrestrials, inviting readers to follow a unique thread for each one and to invent a narrative: “You tell the story!” Viewers first witness the characters in tall apartment pods, crisscrossed by ramps. Inside the circular windows and on the streets, these characters establish their identities: rock star, delivery driver, surfer dude, robotbuilder and baby in a bubble. The creatures visit natural settings with exotic flora; interact near an enormous, pink transformer, while technicians fiddle with its innards; and revel in a concert and rocket race. Flying surfboards, machines shaped like UFOs and teleportation are among the modes of transport. Situations develop in busy, but not overwhelming, rainbow-hued compositions rendered in mixed media: An ET gets lost, the baby bear’s bubble bursts, a pig falls in love. Fans of the first title will recognize animal types and family names; they may speculate on relationships. An “old world” part of the city, with its adorned buildings and familiar military statue, will send close lookers back to the original to compare the effects of time. The Mizielinskis have crafted a civilization that is clever and compassionate, hardworking and fun-loving; it is a pleasure to inhabit and visit. (Picture book. 5-8)
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“Here’s a child’s world, where page borders crop out parents’ faces and private reverie recurs as an all-consuming pastime, transmuted by Nichols through charminglyplain pencil illustrations and mild digital colors.” from maple
SKY RAIDERS
MAPLE
Mull, Brandon Aladdin (432 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-4424-9700-9 Series: Five Kingdoms, 1
Nichols, Lori Illus. by Nichols, Lori Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 20, 2014 978-0-399-16085-1
The creator of the Fablehaven series gets his newest venture off to a literal flying start. A night of trick-or-treating turns genuinely terrifying when sixth-grader Cole and a band of Arizona classmates are transported to the Outskirts, a land between universes. There, he’s seized by slavers and sold to a gang of aerial pirates who plunder the often well-defended floating castles that stream over a bottomless chasm. Intent on saving his friends, he escapes with fellow slave Mira—who turns out to be more than she seems. She leads him through danger-filled adventures in a land of giant desserts and similarly strange locales to a face-off with a monster made of stolen magic. Mull gives his protagonist opportunities aplenty to demonstrate courage, quick wit and a talent for teasing. He also lays inventive twists on magical gear and workings and crafts such oddball monsters and settings that even a native-born character complains at one point, “I keep waiting for this to get less weird, and it keeps not happening.” From the evidence, readers may consider that a promise from the author. Sequels are certain, and they should be welcomed by all who like plenty of “odd” in their odysseys. (Fantasy. 10-13)
SAY HELLO LIKE THIS
Murphy, Mary Illus. by Murphy, Mary Candlewick (32 pp.) $12.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-7636-6951-5
A little girl and a tree grow up together in this sweet debut. Maple, named for a sapling planted just before her birth, plays alongside her special tree every day, giving it hugs and watching its foliage flutter. Her free-spirited, bracing sessions of solitary, outdoor fun appear as crisp vignettes on white backgrounds, their sequencing marking the marching passage of time, which stops for moments of reflection. A long, grassy double-page spread appears at spring, showing Maple bent knees to nose over dolls, directing a miniaturized theater production under the tree’s canopy. Here’s a child’s world, where page borders crop out parents’ faces and private reverie recurs as an all-consuming pastime, transmuted by Nichols through charmingly plain pencil illustrations and mild digital colors. Maple, sweetly nondescript with her round head, low braids, comfortable dresses and pink cheeks, could easily sit next to any young reader at preschool or day care. Leaf rubbings (from real maple leaves!) dazzle with their sudden crinkles, veins and tart greens and orangy yellows. Another small tree, right next to Maple’s, marks the birth of a new sibling (Willow), who soon joins her sister under dancing leaves in this kid’s kingdom. An arboreal homage perfect for children reveling in alone time or reeling with a new sibling’s arrival. (Picture book. 2-6)
SPACE ROCKS!
Toddlers and their adults nationwide will welcome with open arms this clever coupling of animal sounds and lift-the-flap elements. In this book for children newly aware of the delights of saying, “Hello,” Murphy introduces a variety of familiar animals and describes their individual forms of greeting. “A dog hello is licky and loud… / like this! bow-wow-wow-wow!” Lift the flap, and two affable canines leap and prance, tongues every which way, their barks sprawling across the page. Most of the birds and beasts here are the usual animal-sound-book suspects (cats, frogs, chickens, etc.), though a pair of tip-tapping beetles makes for an unexpected and pleasing change of pace. Murphy’s thick, black outlines and bright (but never garish) colors will do well with large groups, and the half-page flaps that turn to reveal the various animal sounds will guarantee that this becomes a crowd pleaser. While few would argue that there is a dearth of quality animalsound books out there, fewer still would fail to be charmed by Murphy’s smartly targeted book for the ankle-biter set. A hoot (pun intended). (Picture book. 1-4)
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O’Donnell, Tom Razorbill/Penguin (336 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 6, 2014 978-1-59514-713-4 Xotonian Chorkle’s home asteroid Gelo is so boring that of course it’s going to spy on the iridium-stealing, fur-tufted invaders from Eo. Chorkle’s originator allowed it (there is no gender on Gelo) to check out Jehe Canyon for human incursion as long as it agreed to leave if it saw them…but they’re so interesting, and they have amazingly fun technology. Xotonians are adept at hiding, so the aliens are oblivious to Chorkle’s presence, but it makes off with their hologram device. When the Xotonians decide to unleash the dreaded, destructive Q-sik weapon to chase off the humans, Chorkle wants to warn the humans. It knows the ones it saw in the canyon are young ones. Having learned some human language from the hologram device and human transmissions, Chorkle intends to warn them…but it’s distracted by the sugary pink magic of Feeney’s Original Astronaut Ice Cream, and the young humans end up marooned on Gelo. Now Chorkle must |
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“Zane’s perspective as an outsider allows Philbrick to weave in social commentary on race, class, greed and morality, offering rich fodder for reflection and discussion.” from zane and the hurricane
keep them alive until their originators return for them. When the Vorem, the ancient enemy of the Xotonians, reappear, the fate of the solar system might hang in the balance. O’Donnell’s debut is an imaginative, smart and laugh-out-loud adventure. Chorkle is charming, and its alien perspective on the human invaders and the ensuing culture clash never falters. Clap your thol’graz—the open ending begs for a sequel! (Science fiction. 9-12)
LITTLE POEMS FOR TINY EARS
Oliver, Lin Illus. by dePaola, Tomie Nancy Paulsen Books (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-399-16605-1 Twenty-three original, first-person poems for the very young. Following a multiethnic cast of little ones through their day and highlighting highchairs, strollers and other important objects in their lives, Oliver pens a set of poems tailor-made for tiny ears and minds. She quietly marvels at the wonder of toes: “Way down there at the end of my feet, / I’ve got ten toes; they’re really sweet. / I can count them, make them wiggle. / When they’re tickled, watch me giggle…. / I’ll bet that you have ten toes too. / Can you count them like I do?” The simple definition of sneeze is spun with whimsy: “A sneeze / Is a breeze / In / Your / Nose.” Throughout, the poems compel gentle caresses and interaction between adult and child. Varied rhythm and rhyme schemes enrich a baby’s exploration of sound at the time when his or her developing mind needs it most. DePaola’s roundfaced babes, colored with delicate shading and cozy acrylics, wrap readers in warmth, while the square frames and initial letters mimic childhood blocks, bringing a touch of comfort and nostalgia to the package. A tenderly crafted collection that captures the joyous individual moments of infant discoveries. (Picture book/poetry. 6 mos.-2)
A BABY ELEPHANT IN THE WILD
O’Connell, Caitlin Photos by O’Connell, Caitlin; Rodwell, Timothy HMH Books (40 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 18, 2014 978-0-544-14944-1 A scientist highlights elephant family values in this rare glimpse of a newborn’s first season. “Family is very important to elephants,” notes O’Connell (Elephant Scientist, 2011), taking advantage of a serendipitous birth in a wild herd to observe and describe how adorable little “Liza”—“Even her belly and toenails are pink”—is nurtured and protected by her mother and other family members through her 118
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first few months. Reinforcing that message, the color photos almost without exception catch Liza posing beneath, or even leaning against, obviously attentive older elephants as the herd travels across the Namibian plain to a water hole for a drink and a refreshing mud bath. The physical birth itself isn’t described or shown, and the author covers the natural hazards that wild elephants face only in general terms (even the one photo showing elephants being tracked by lions has been artfully blurred). Nevertheless, her accounts of elephant growth, social behavior, and environmental and human challenges are both detailed enough to satisfy demanding young naturalists and easy for younger general readers to understand. A fetching portrait, from a researcher who has studied these animals for many years and plainly cares for them deeply. (fact page, afterword) (Informational picture book. 6-8)
ZANE AND THE HURRICANE A Story of Katrina
Philbrick, Rodman Blue Sky/Scholastic (192 pp.) $16.99 | $16.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-545-34238-4 978-0-545-63347-5 e-book An appropriately serious and occasionally gruesome tale of surviving Hurricane Katina, buoyed by large doses of
hope and humor. Twelve-year-old Zane Dupree, a New Hampshire native, is on his first visit to his newly discovered Grammy in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina forces them to evacuate. On the way out of the city, Zane’s dog jumps out of the van, and Zane follows, soon finding himself back at his grandmother’s house alone with the storm quickly closing in. When the winds die down, rising floodwaters force Zane into the sweltering attic, from which he is rescued by local musician Tru and his spunky charge, Malvina. The three embark on an epic adventure—skirting dead bodies and poisonous snakes in the floodwaters, making it to the Superdome only to realize there is no help to be had there, escaping a drug dealer intent on capturing Malvina and attempting to cross the guarded bridge to Algiers. Careful attention to detail in representations of the storm, the city and local dialect give this tale a realistic feel. Zane’s perspective as an outsider allows Philbrick to weave in social commentary on race, class, greed and morality, offering rich fodder for reflection and discussion. This compelling story of Katrina is like the floodwaters it describes: quickly moving, sometimes treacherous and sometimes forgiving, with a lot going on beneath the surface. (Historical fiction. 10-14)
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DREAM BIRTHDAY
Phillips, Ruby Ann Illus. by Sernur, Isik Capstone Young Readers (112 pp.) $5.95 paper | Feb. 1, 2014 978-1-4795-3152-3 Series: Krystal Ball, 1 A spunky fourth-grade seer fears her upcoming birthday will be a disaster. Krystal Ball, who “may look small” but is “really a medium,” has premonitions, especially predictive dreams. A hazy vision gives her a bad feeling about her upcoming birthday party, but it is too vague for her to interpret. And she has much practice in interpretation, as the majority of her psychic powers manifest through highly metaphorical, wild dreams—the first of which features spiked-haired, chainwearing Martians later revealed to refer to punk fans of a band, Army of Ares, that Krystal and her family encounter on their way to visit her tarot card–wielding grandmother. Readers will enjoy trying to guess what the dreams mean. Finally, disaster strikes: Plumbing problems from the apartment above Krystal’s home cause part of her living room’s ceiling to collapse, and the damage can’t be fixed in time for it to host her party. Of course, everything turns out OK in the end but not until Krystal forgives her upstairs neighbor and has another dream. Krystal’s first-person voice is occasionally didactic, but it fits her personality well enough not to be intrusive. She walks a careful balance between being confident enough to embrace her own offbeat style and being concerned that others might think she’s weird. Great for kids who want a pinch of magic in their sliceof-life stories. (horoscopes by Krystal Ball, Krystal’s fortune game) (Fantasy. 6-10)
CLARA AND DAVIE
Polacco, Patricia Illus. by Polacco, Patricia Scholastic (40 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-545-35477-6
From her apparently inexhaustible font of family stories, Polacco chooses one about Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross and a distant relative by marriage. Clara is born on Christmas Day 1821 and mostly raised by her siblings, though aside from mentioning that her mother was ill, no real reason is given for this. Her intense shyness is attributed to a severe lisp, which leads to her education at home. Young Clara loves to study and to work with animals and flowers, displaying a gift for healing early on. When her brother Davie, who took her everywhere and taught her everything, falls from a barn beam and breaks both legs, Clara sets the bones and cares for him for two years. It is that care and healing that Polacco centers this story on. The pictures are done in Polacco’s vivid, vibrant pencil, marker and acrylics, with exaggerated gestures and abundant details. The dialogue is occasionally a bit over-the-top: |
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“Davie, I know you can walk. You have always told me that I have a gift of healing. Unless you try to walk, I’ll never believe that again.” An author’s note outlines Barton’s founding of the American Red Cross and her work with soldiers during the Civil War. The abundance of dialogue and absence of specific sources makes this book problematic for use as nonfiction. Not up to Polacco’s usual standard. (Picture book. 7-10)
THE ABC OF FABULOUS PRINCESSES
Puchner, Willy Illus. by Puchner, Willy NorthSouth (64 pp.) $19.95 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-0-7358-4113-0
This is not your mother’s abecedary. There is a letter on every spread, and Princess Anna does present an ambrosia apple, but that is where the similarity stops. The framing story is slim: An unambitious, avian prince is awaiting the right partner. He gazes out the window while his parents round up contenders. As the exotic birds parade by, each with a gift and her own spread, there is the sensation of entering the slightly surreal world of Peter Sis’ Conference of the Birds (2011)—if that journey were being rewound—or of Venice during Carnival. The birds wear floor-length costumes, and Princess Victoria actually comes from the Veneto, bearing a vizard (the beaked plague-doctor’s mask). The mysterious objects and animals, the deep colors and subtle textures, and the luminous auras surrounding the princesses interact to conjure a magical atmosphere. The narrative’s construction is more about alliteration than letter recognition, with three to five sentences per creature producing a variety of delicious sounds, unfamiliar words and idiosyncratic images. Princess Elmira “is extravagant, empathetic, and enormously emancipated.” She brings “eleven elegant elephants.” The prince is weary just anticipating this process; children who prefer more action, plot or character development may tire as well. Those who willingly follow aural and visual enticements to other realms will be enchanted. (Picture book. 4-8)
OF COURSE THEY DO! Boys and Girls Can Do Anything
Roger, Marie-Sabine Photos by Sol, Anne Charlesbridge (40 pp.) $9.95 | $6.99 e-book | Mar. 11, 2014 978-1-58089-669-6 978-1-60734-732-3 e-book
Sturdy paper, large, spare text, and bold colors imply the youngest audience, but both words and pictures are bound to mislead in this poorly composed gender-role primer. |
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The opening left-hand page shows two little girls in black and pink, respectively, their arms in ballerinalike arches. The opposite page bluntly states, “Boys don’t dance.” The following double-page spread shows two young men in sweatpants and hoodies hip-hopping their way across the room and the retort, “What? Of course they do!” (No males in tights in sight.) Similarly, the girl jumping rope casually is followed by a boxer training in a seedy basement. The message muddles further as identically strong statements about what boys or girls don’t do are followed with weaker answers, such as “Are you sure?” and “Don’t they?” Photographs of active little boys and girls, often using toys, are followed by stock photographs of grown men and women vaguely performing the task in question, as with the woman who seems to be measuring wood at a male-dominated construction site in answer to “Girls don’t build things.” Except for the cover photograph of a blue-shirted boy shyly holding a doll near a pink-clad girl with a toy airplane, all the children in the photographs are shown in traditional gender roles. Since the book was originally published in French, one might excuse the text as “lost in translation,” but that cannot exonerate the photographs. (Picture book. 2-5)
WHAT THE MOON SAID
Rosengren, Gayle Illus. by Bean, Jonathan Putnam (224 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 20, 2014 978-0-399-16352-4
A coming-of-age tale gets to the heart of family dynamics in the face of drastic life changes in the earliest days of the Depression. Esther’s family moves to a farm in Wisconsin when her father loses his job. She comes to like farm life in spite of the hardships of a house with no electricity, an outhouse instead of a bathroom and lots of chores. But her overwhelming mission is to win her mother’s love by being obedient and helpful, for she believes that her mother doesn’t really love her, as she never hugs or kisses the girl and seems to recoil from any display of affection from her. Esther’s mother sees dangerous omens everywhere: in dreams, in the configuration of the moon and in small daily occurrences. Some of these beliefs cause even more painful difficulties in their relationship, as when she demands that Esther end a friendship when she sees the girl has a mole that is, to her, the mark of angry fairies. Esther is often confused, but she’s able to withstand everything that happens with resilience and a measure of hope. Every episode, whether ordinary or momentous, fills in a bit of the puzzle and leads Esther and readers to a growing understanding and acceptance of the nature of love and home and family ties. It’s a quiet, old-fashioned story; Bean’s black-and-white chapter heads reinforce its cozy, mid-20th-century feel. Sensitive and tender. (Fiction. 8-12)
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FLAME
Ryan, Amy Kathleen St. Martin’s Griffin (320 pp.) $18.99 | $9.99 e-book | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-312-62136-0 978-1-250-01417-7 e-book Series: Sky Chasers, 3 When this meaty, harrowing conclusion to the Sky Chasers series opens, the inhabitants of the vessel Empyrean are fleeing their destroyed spacecraft to join their former enemies on board the New Horizon. Action begins immediately, and the story shifts mainly among the points of view of Waverly, Kieran and Seth. Waverly and Kieran find themselves being used for opposite political ends, while Seth lives as a fugitive on the New Horizon. Readers who have forgotten the many intricacies of the previous volumes’ plots are eventually brought up to speed, but the author has wisely chosen to reintroduce the many characters and incidents slowly as new action unfolds rather than sum up the broad, detailed back story in one dense lump. The pace is at times methodical, and much of the suspense comes from characters’ and readers’ uncertainty as to whom to trust. Stakes are high, however, and readers witness graphic (though generally not gory) violence and bodily harm as the three teens work to both overthrow and defend Pastor Anne Mather, the New Horizon’s leader. It all comes to a head in a climax that is tense and viscerally frightening. Detailed and gripping, with a thorough and satisfying resolution. (Science fiction. 14 & up)
CODENAME ZERO
Rylander, Chris Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $16.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-06-212008-3 978-0-06-212010-6 e-book Desperate to spice up life in his small, North Dakota town, seventh-grader Carson Fender has secured his position as Erik Hill Middle School’s number-one prankster. But shortly after Carson orchestrates the release of a herd of fainting goats on school grounds, life in Minot gets a whole lot more interesting…and it doesn’t have anything to do with the goats. When a strange man unloads a mysterious package on Carson and informs him that “the fate of the world depends” on him delivering it to a Mr. Jensen, it becomes clear that there’s more going on in this small town than he ever imagined, and Carson is now at the heart of it all. With its high-stakes secret missions, gadgets and underground government agencies, readers in search of a solid middle-grade spy novel will find plenty to enjoy here. Carson is a funny and engaging protagonist, and readers will relate to both his longing for a more interesting life kirkus.com
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“Repetitive phrases and plot patterns mix with delightfully descriptive language and surprise elements to keep readers and listeners agog with interest.” from ten eggs in a nest
and his angst once he finds it. Though Carson has an intriguing cast of close friends, including a deliciously unapologetic, conspiracy-theorist best friend, one of the novel’s greatest shortcomings is that they don’t play a larger role in the story. Still, this is an exciting, zippy read that will leave readers wondering if there’s more to their own hometowns than meets the eye. (Thriller. 9-12)
TEN EGGS IN A NEST
Sadler, Marilyn Illus. by Fleming, Michael Random House (48 pp.) $9.99 | $12.99 PLB | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-449-81082-8 978-0-375-97151-8 PLB Ten eggs hatch, and the counting begins in this tale aimed at the very youngest readers. Gwen the hen and Red Rooster are thrilled when their eggs hatch. Red has not been allowed to count the eggs in the nest, as that would bring bad luck. When the first chick hatches, Red rushes to get a worm from Pinky Pig, only to arrive back at the nest to find two more. As each batch of baby chicks is born, Red and Gwen add and count them joyfully. Red purchases more worms, counting and paying the appropriate amount of coins. That is the whole tale, but Sadler manages to keep it fastpaced and lively. Repetitive phrases and plot patterns mix with delightfully descriptive language and surprise elements to keep readers and listeners agog with interest. Proud papa Red struts and puffs his chest when he tells Pinky of his newborn chicks. When he realizes that the final count was 10, “[y]ou could have knocked him over with a feather.” Lots of white space surrounds heavy, black, large print with the names of numbers emphasized in all capitals. Fleming’s black-outlined, brightly colored illustrations are expressive and filled with action, aptly capturing all the excitement while allowing little readers to count along with Red and Gwen. A happy and entertaining tale. (Early reader. 2-5)
ALL THAT GLITTERS
Santopolo, Jill Aladdin (128 pp.) $15.99 | $5.99 paper | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-4424-7381-2 978-1-4424-7380-5 paper Series: Sparkle Spa, 1 This amusing chapter-book series opener follows two grade school sisters as they start their own donations-powered nail salon. Fifth-grader Aly and her little sister, Brooke, a third grader, love helping out Mom in her thriving nail salon. Aly has become quite skilled in applying nail polish to Brooke’s fingers and toes, |
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so when Jenica, an envied sixth grader and star of the school soccer team, asks for special, rainbow-sparkly toe polish, with her Mom’s permission Aly does her very best. If Jenica is pleased, more members of the team might want the same. When that happy event occurs, Aly and Brooke ask Mom for permission to start their own nail salon in the back of the store, asking for donations that will go to charity instead of direct payment for their work. All goes well until mean girl Suzy shows up and threatens to spread nasty rumors. Can the sisters keep their new business alive? Santopolo keeps the prose easily readable and the atmosphere light as she focuses on the girls’ creativity in setting up their salon. Simple characterizations come across well, and a touch of light suspense keeps things moving. The second book in the series, Purple Nails and Puppy Tails (978-1-4424-73843; 978-1-4424-7383-6 paper), in which the girls expand their clientele to dogs and rescue puppies, works as a companion to this one. The nicely original business plot may interest many young entrepreneurs. Not just for lemonade-stand owners. (Fiction. 7-10)
THE JUNCTION OF SUNSHINE AND LUCKY
Schindler, Holly Dial (240 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 6, 2014 978-0-8037-3725-9
There are no surprises here, but it’s a heartwarming and uplifting story nonetheless. Auggie (short for August, after her grandfather, Gus, who is raising her) thinks her neighbors and neighborhood are perfect. As she rides around with Gus in Old Glory, his trash-hauling truck, she excitedly anticipates her first day of fifth grade at a new school in a different part of town. But when she gets there, she realizes that her beloved neighborhood is actually the poor part of town, and worse, she feels ashamed. As she wrestles with her feelings, which are exacerbated by the defection of her best friend to the rich side, Gus and several neighbors receive notices from the town’s House Beautification Committee stating that their properties are in violation. Auggie determines to fight back and with Gus’ unstinting help, turns their house and yard into a folk-art extravaganza. Further clashes with the committee follow. Auggie’s presenttense, first-person narration, rife with similes, often comes off sounding more contrived than quirky, and the story’s numerous characters function more as formulaic devices rather than individual personalities. Additionally, the storyline concerning Auggie’s absent mother seems more tangential than imperative, and its revelatory windup comes as no surprise. The story shines in its conclusion, however, with vibrant themes of community, self-empowerment and artistic vision delivered with a satisfying verve that forgives any predictability. (Fiction. 9-12)
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“Scott wraps the first-person narration in Emma’s swirling emotions, but she allows readers to see through that fog to watch the reality of the events.” from heartbeat
GOLDI ROCKS & THE THREE BEARS
in Emma’s swirling emotions, but she allows readers to see through that fog to watch the reality of the events. The author does not judge Emma or Dan despite the deliberately skewed viewpoint. An intense examination of a family coping with grief, this absorbing character study easily keeps pages turning. (Fiction. 12 & up)
Schwartz, Corey Rosen; Coulton, Beth Illus. by Wragg, Nate Putnam (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 6, 2014 978-0-399-25685-1
The classic tale of a blonde house invader is given a new rock-’n’-roll spin. Schwartz and Coulton use light verse to trace the beginnings of a hot new band. Papa Bear can play the drums, Mama Bear is great on guitar, and Baby Bear tickles the ivories, but none of them can hit the high notes they need to attract an audience. While they are out auditioning singers, Goldi stumbles upon their cottage-turned–recording studio. “ ‘A studio! Great balls of fire!’ / Amazed, Goldi raced through the door. / She forgot about food / and was now in the mood / to hurry on in and explore.” After trying out the various instruments, mics and headphones, she eventually falls asleep at the keyboard, where the bear family finds her drooling on the keys. Her startled scream is the perfect high C the band has been looking for. “Their albums now top all the rock charts. / A countrywide tour has been planned. / The fans scream and shout. / They’re crazy about… // Goldi Rocks and the Great Three Bear Band.” Wragg’s pencil-and–digital cartoon illustrations match the text but add little that’s new, and the limericklike verse doesn’t always scan well. Cute but not much more. (Fractured fairy tale. 5-8)
HEARTBEAT
Scott, Elizabeth Harlequin Teen (304 pp.) $16.99 | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-373-21096-1 This first-person examination of a girl mourning her mother’s sudden death explores the anger survivors often feel when confronting grief. Seventeen-year old Emma hates her stepfather, Dan, because he’s decided to keep her pregnant, brain-dead mother alive on machines until the baby becomes viable. Although she realizes that she’s allowing her rage to consume her, she continues to indulge her hatred for her stepfather, whom she formerly loved and whom she knows her mother loved, and she finds herself unable to see the baby as her brother. Emma and Dan visit her mom every day, and there, she meets Caleb, a boy who’s been in trouble ever since his little sister died accidentally while under his supervision. Although her fellow high school students view Caleb as a pariah, Emma finds herself drawn to him: In Caleb, she discovers the only person who can understand her. As events progress, however, Emma will have to make her own decision about her mother’s plight, and the true reason for her rage, aside from her obvious grief, emerges. Scott wraps the first-person narration 122
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LOVE MATCH
Seles, Monica Bloomsbury (224 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 paper | Feb. 25, 2014 978-1-61963-159-5 978-1-59990-902-8 paper Series: Academy, 2 Seles returns with the second in her series about teens in training to become elite athletes and envied celebrities (Game On, 2013). Maya is settling into her stay at the Academy after enduring a few months full of drama on and off the tennis court. Jake’s betrayal with her archrival was a blow, but now she is determined to improve her game as she makes her way on the professional women’s tour. Despite coming up short against a veteran player, Maya’s unexpectedly strong performance garners attention from the press and a possible agent. When she gets back to school, she is welcomed and encouraged by the solid friendships of Cleo and Renee, who help her cope with the additional distractions of paparazzi, gossip sites, a possible modeling job and an entanglement with Jake’s brother, Travis. Maya has learned a lot during her time at the Academy, but the high-stakes combination of competition and celebrity create new challenges for the savvy 16-year-old. This installment provides a look behind the scenes as the all-important image-making of young athletes unfolds. Here, a headline can give sought-after exposure, or an influential blogger’s targeted comments can bring misery. Seles does a good job of portraying the pressures of Maya’s need for financial success, unlike some of her peers. Readers will find themselves pulling for this scrappy teen as she navigates fame and relationships. (Fiction. 12 & up)
SAVING KABUL CORNER
Senzai, N.H. Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4424-8494-8 The arrival of a rival Afghani food market at the same California shopping plaza as the Shinwari family’s already established store brings with it the threat of an awakened family feud. kirkus.com
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Eleven-year-old Ariana Shinwari feels klutzy and inadequate next to her almost-12-year-old perfect cousin, Laila, who has moved in with Ariana’s family after fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan, leaving her father, a translator for the American Army, behind. And now it looks like Ariana’s best friend, Mariam, who also fled Afghanistan with her family, has all of her classes with Laila. But when strange things start to happen at both Kabul Corner and the upstart Pamir Market, schoolgirl conflicts give way to collaboration among Ariana, Laila, Mariam and Wali, the son of the new store’s owner. Senzai successfully weaves the dynamics of Afghan culture, history and political wranglings into a classically American mystery story, unraveling who and what are really at the heart of the conflict between the two Afghani grocery stores. Readers will appreciate that young people solve all of the questions at hand and ultimately bring the two families together. An engaging mystery—that it’s about Afghani families struggling and surviving in America is a plus. (Fiction. 8-12)
THE PORT CHICAGO 50 Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights
Sheinkin, Steve Roaring Brook (208 pp.) $19.99 | Jan. 21, 2014 978-1-59643-796-8
On July 17, 1944, at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine 30 miles northeast of San Francisco, an explosion—the largest manmade explosion in history to that point—killed more than 300 men, leading to the largest mass trial in United States history. “[B]efore Brown v. Board of Education or Truman’s executive order, before Rosa Parks or Jackie Robinson—before any of this, there was Port Chicago.” At Port Chicago, Navy ships were loaded with bombs and ammunition. All of the officers were white, and all of the sailors handling the dangerous explosives were black, with no training in how to do their jobs. When the huge explosion flattened the base, 320 men were killed, 202 of them black sailors who had been loading the ammunition. When it came time to resume work, 50 black sailors refused to work under the unsafe conditions on the segregated base and were charged with mutiny, with the possibility of execution. In this thoroughly researched and well-documented drama, Sheinkin lets the participants tell the story, masterfully lacing the narrative with extensive quotations drawn from oral histories, information from trial transcripts and archival photographs. The event, little known today, is brought to life and placed in historical context, with Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall and Jackie Robinson figuring in the story. An important chapter in the civil rights movement, presenting 50 new heroes. (source notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, picture credits) (Nonfiction. 10-14)
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LOVE ME
Shukert, Rachel Delacorte (336 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | $20.99 PLB Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-385-74110-1 978-0-375-98426-6 e-book 978-0-375-98985-8 PLB Series: Starstruck, 2 In this scintillating sequel to Starstruck (2013), the stakes are higher, the fights are cattier, and the drama soars sky-high. Margo Sterling, nee Margaret Frobisher, a former Pasadena society girl, seems to now have it all: good looks, a promising acting career and the handsome Dane Forrest on her arm. When her studio orchestrates impending nuptials between them, Margo must decide if she will concede to an illusory life or have a real one. As her star falters, Dane’s rises. Meanwhile, tired of her controlling mother, Gabby Preston wants to shed her persona as the sweet-faced child star with sausage curls. Fueled by this determination and a dangerous regimen of pills and alcohol, she takes up with bad-boy musician Eddie Sharp. And in yet another plot thread, leaving her life at the brothel behind, Amanda Farraday is determined to make it in Hollywood. However, when her studio contract is terminated and her beau, Harry Gordon, leaves her after discovering her previous line of work, she makes a rash decision that sets off a chain of events that affects all three girls. Their interwoven narratives of Hollywood in the 1930s have more twists and turns than Mulholland Drive. Secrets abound, and enough is held back to ensure that the next volume will have plenty left to reveal. This sizzling sequel definitely delivers the goods: think Valley of the Dolls meets Gossip Girl. (Historical fiction. 14 & up)
TESLA’S ATTIC
Shusterman, Neal; Elfman, Eric Disney Hyperion (256 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-4231-4803-6 Series: Accelerati Trilogy, 1 In Book 1 of the Accelerati Trilogy, Nick Slate cleans out his attic, holds a garage sale and changes “the very course of human existence.” The junk in the attic of Nick’s new house seems to be a “boneyard of uselessness,” but the old toasters, electric mixers, cameras and tape recorders turn out to be lost inventions of a mad scientist, and finding them makes Nick and his friends “part of some invisible clockwork…churning its gears toward some dark, mysterious end.” The box camera foretells the future, the See ’n Say toy channels the universe, little brother Danny’s baseball glove draws stars from the sky, and a depleted wet-cell battery brings the dead to life. A posse of sinister scientists is after these objects for their own questionable |
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FAKING NORMAL
ends, and if Nick’s garage sale has unleashed forces that might end the world, they also might reveal a way to head off the extinction of the human race. Lively, intelligent prose elevates this story of teenagers versus mad scientists, the third-person point of view offering a stage to various players in their play of galactic consequence. A wild tale in the spirit of Back to the Future, with a hint of Malamud’s The Natural tossed in. (Science fiction. 8-14)
Stevens, Courtney C. HarperTeen (336 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 e-book | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-06-224538-0 978-0-06-224540-3 e-book
E-I-E-I-O How Old Macdonald Got His Farm (with a Little Help from a Hen)
Sierra, Judy Illus. by Myers, Matthew Candlewick (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 25, 2014 978-0-7636-6043-7
In this rhymed caper, Old MacDonald has a house—and a high-maintenance lawn that’s ripe for change. His new goat prefers the hedges to the lawn, so Old Mac acquires a chicken. “Not your average bird was she, / but the smartest hen in history.” Little Red directs Mac through a backyard transformation that includes sheet mulching, composting, manuring (Mac gets a horse), vermicomposting (via a worm bin) and raised-bed gardening. The farmer-in-training takes flak from suburban neighbors outraged about the mud and stink that mark the transition from lawn to full-fledged minifarm. Soon, though, they’re gladly buying veggies, goat cheese and honey from “Mac and Red’s Homemade Farm” and eggs from their “Co-op Coop.” Myers’ inventive acrylic-on–illustration board paintings add a bushel of laugh-out-loud details, from documents attesting to Red’s impressive horticultural credentials to an in-your-face depiction of horse poop. (The artist takes “square-jawed” to a new dimension to depict Old Mac.) In one scene, healthy root veggies commingle with worms in three-quarters of the picture plane, while aboveground, Mac chats up an appreciative letter carrier. Bits of Sierra’s text can be sung to the familiar tune, rendering this a good choice for spring storytimes and family read-alouds. Sierra’s upbeat look at small-scale local farming, fulsomely fertilized by Myers, yields a harvest of good fun. (Picture book. 4-8)
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Reminiscent of Melinda in Speak, Alexi tries to find her voice after being raped. Only the self-inflicted scratches on the 16-year-old’s neck reveal any sign that someone close to her coerced her into having sex at a football party. Now Alexi is “faking normal” to protect the perpetrator and try to keep the event in the past. But socially awkward Bodee, aka “Kool-Aid Kid” for his penchant for temporary hair coloring, knows she has a secret— because he has one too. After his abusive father kills his mother, he’s invited to finish the school year at Alexi’s home. As a tentative friendship blossoms, Alexi and Bodee become allies—and more—as they help each other deal with their life-changing traumas and face recovery together. Stevens’ debut effort keeps it real and never preachy as Alexi and her BFFs question their sexuality and relationship expectations. Even more realistic are Alexi’s reactions to the rape as she wonders why she couldn’t utter the word no, whether a rape actually occurred and how her family will react. The perpetrator’s identity, confounded by plenty of red herrings, remains a mystery until the very end. Also adding mystery and romantic intrigue is the clandestine “Captain Lyric,” who corresponds and seems to acknowledge Alexi’s pain through covert song lyrics left on a school desk. A story that resonates. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14 & up)
HUNTED
Stiefvater, Maggie Scholastic (192 pp.) $12.99 | $12.99 e-book | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-545-52244-1 978-0-545-52256-4 e-book Series: Spirit Animals, 2 Four young heroes, chosen to save Erdas from the rising threat of the Devourer, find themselves torn between their quest and the needs of the ones they love. In between their expeditions to obtain the Great Beasts’ talismans, Conor, Meilin, Abeke and Rollan face an equally difficult task: learning to bond with their spirit animals. Each must confront his or her weaknesses in order to understand the spirit animals’ strengths. Conor, normally timid, must rely on Briggan the Wolf to learn to lead. Meilin, a trained warrior, must yield to the peaceful patience of her giant panda, Jhi. However, Rollan and Essix the Falcon’s discernment and Abeke and her leopard Uraza’s courage allow the four to retrieve the talisman of Rumfuss the Boar. Stiefvater brings to this multiply authored, multiplatform series her ability to create complex, sympathetic kirkus.com
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“Young’s brightly colored Cars-like illustrations bring Frankie to life, the windshield his eyes, the front bumper his mouth, the rest of thetruck body serving to help express his emotions.” from big rig
characters, enhancing the plot-heavy narrative she inherited (Wild Born, by Brandon Mull, 2013). Characters grapple with conflicting motives, familial responsibilities and the consequences of their choices. This increasing depth moves the story from a straightforward adventure fantasy to an insightful look at what it means to be a hero, with the glory it brings and the sacrifice it demands. The accompanying game offers an exciting off-page experience. Fantastical adventure is enhanced by complex characters. (Fantasy. 8-12)
DRAGON ON TRIAL
Sutherland, Tui T.; Sutherland, Kari Harper/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $16.99 | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-06-085143-9 Series: Menagerie, 2 New threats to the existence of a hidden refuge for magical and mythical animals occupy a trio of young sleuths in this droll middle volume. The tale picks up just after the opener’s cliffhanger ending (The Menagerie, 2013) and likewise ends midcourse with an ominous, sequel-keying discovery. In between Zoe, Logan and their part-merman buddy, Blue, find themselves racing to discover the truth about the apparent murder of Pelly, the thoroughly obnoxious goose whose golden eggs are nonetheless the Menagerie’s sole source of income, and to keep the entire Wyoming facility from being shut down by regulatory agents. Meanwhile the large cast of griffins, hell hounds and other creatures—many with oversized egos, bad dispositions or both—need often hazardous care and feeding: “If you look a basilisk in the eye, it kills you instantly. If you hear a basilisk hiss, it kills you instantly. If you smell a wide-awake basilisk—.” And lest the pace lag for even a moment, the authors also stage a hilarious jury screening for a dragon’s trial-by-peers, trot in a rambunctious family of unregistered shape-changers, engineer encounters between Blue and a preening classmate with a crush, and shoehorn in several other subplots, both new and ongoing. Busy, busy…but funny, funny too, not to mention positively stuffed with exotic fauna. (map) (Fantasy. 10-12)
BIG RIG
Swenson, Jamie A. Illus. by Young, Ned Disney Hyperion (32 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-1-4231-6330-5 Frankie the semi introduces himself and all the things he can do. A big rig gets up close and personal in Swenson’s latest, and young vehicle lovers will be enthralled. Frankie pulls no punches in this down-to-earth look at semis. He speaks directly to readers, and his voice is definitely that of a truck. (Those who read this aloud may be thrown off by the rhyme that comes and goes.) Frankie counts his 18 wheels (by twos), shows what he is hauling and invites readers along for the ride. Onomatopoeic words in a large font fill up the spreads as Frankie blasts his horn for readers, tests out his jake brake, turns on the wipers during a brief storm and suffers a blown tire, all capturing the real-life sounds. Frankie introduces readers to trucking terms and phrases (defined in the “Truck-tionary” in the backmatter) that are sure to tickle young readers’ fancies: alligator, magic mile, back off the hammer, Christmas tree. Throughout, Young’s brightly colored Cars-like illustrations bring Frankie to life, the windshield his eyes, the front bumper his mouth, the rest of the truck body serving to help express his emotions. Frankie’s surroundings are slightly retro, but all is shiny and spiffed, just like the big rig himself. Youngsters who meet Frankie will be looking for him on every highway, as he’s a friend they won’t soon forget. (Picture book. 3-5)
DARK LORD School’s Out
Thomson, Jamie Illus. by Hartas, Freya Walker (384 pp.) $16.99 | Feb. 4, 2014 978-0-8027-3522-5 Series: Dark Lord, 2 While the Dark Lord’s away, everyone begins living in peace and harmony, much to the chagrin of the White Wiz-
ard, Hasdruban. Dirk Lloyd, or the Dark Lord, the Nameless One, the World Burner, the Sorcerer Supreme, etc., is still in exile on Earth in the body of a 12-year-old boy who lives with Christopher and his parents. Their friend Sooz (short for Susan) was accidentally sent to the Dark Lands, Dirk’s world of origin, when the trio attempted to magically send Dirk home. Now the boys have the added task of rescuing Sooz and a new impediment, in the form of a nanny who has a secret identity and is likely trying to kill Dirk. Since he’s no longer evil incarnate, her attempts fail miserably. Meanwhile, goth girl Sooz has befriended the Dark Lord’s minions (all that black!) and brought peace to his lands, |
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“The language is smart, innocent and full of surprising—but age-fitting—turns of phrase.” from the day my father became a bush
much to the disbelief of Hasdruban (who’s probably actually more evil than the Dark Lord). Can Dirk and Christopher save Sooz? Does she want to be saved? Would Dirk really sacrifice his friends to become Dark Lord once more? Here’s hoping Thomson’s second Dark Lord title is not the last given the open ending. It is sarcastic British fantasy in the Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams vein; it is a bit long and can tend toward silly, but it will satisfy fans of tongue-in-cheek. Best read with its companion tome…let’s just say best read; wouldn’t want to anger the Dark Lord. (Humorous fantasy. 10-14)
DARKEST FEAR
Tiernan, Cate Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster (368 pp.) $17.99 | $9.99 paper | Jan. 7, 2014 978-1-4424-8246-3 978-1-4424-8246-3 paper Series: Birthright, 1 The first book in Tiernan’s Birthright series (Eternally Yours, 2012, etc.) is both predictable and unoriginal. Vivi Neves has known she’s one of the haguari, an ancient race of shape-shifting jaguar people, since she was 13. After five years of fighting her parents’ efforts to persuade her to embrace her heritage, Vivi is forced to change for the first time when she and her parents are attacked during a family picnic. Her parents end up dead, her father’s heart missing. Among her parents’ belongings, Vivi uncovers evidence of an aunt she never knew existed and heads to New Orleans to find her. Instead, she meets her 20-something cousin, Matéo, whose parents died a year and a half before, their hearts also taken. Vivi moves in with Matéo and his girlfriend and their many haguari friends, and she finds safety and normalcy in her barista job at a local cafe. There, she begins a will-theywon’t-they relationship with moody Rafael, the manager. Vivi’s first-person narration is an exhausting mix of back story and summary that prevents the plot from developing. She thinks and speaks in ellipses and speculative questions, and her snarky voice is whiny rather than quirky. Her jaguar voice is a streamof-consciousness jumble of broken and run-on sentences in present tense, and the move from one voice to the other is jarring. The anticlimactic ending will leave readers too frustrated to read subsequent installments to find out who is kidnapping haguari and taking their hearts. This lackluster addition to the bloated teen-paranormal-romance genre has nothing new to offer. (Paranormal romance. 13-18)
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THE TINKER KING
Trent, Tiffany Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 11, 2014 978-1-4424-5759-1 978-1-4424-5761-4 e-book The prize for saving the world is having to do it all over again in this companion to the steampunk romance The Unnaturalists (2012). Syrus, Vespa, Olivia and Bayne are trying to rebuild their empire after destroying the Creeping Waste. Empress Olivia rules her fractured people of humans and Elementals from a ramshackle warehouse, while her devoted admirer, the Tinker Syrus, tries unsuccessfully to repair it. The magic users Bayne and Vespa try to help, even as they dance around their own romantic tensions. New villains threaten the fragile peace. From within, they’re challenged by Bayne’s estranged, noble parents, who may well be ignoring Olivia’s edict and using myth distilled from murdered Elementals to power their engines. From without, an ancient and legendary evil threatens: Ximu, Queen of the Shadowspiders. In interleaved chapters told from Syrus’ present-tense, first-person perspective alternating with Vespa’s past-tense, third-person point of view, the adventure unfolds with jumpy pacing but luscious worldbuilding. Nineteenth-century science has become religion in this fairyland full of airships and clockwork beasties. There are clear missed opportunities here: “What in the name of Darwin and all his Apes” is the point of bringing in such a famous eccentric as Nikola Tesla—famous for a hatred of round objects and an obsession with the number three—if only to portray him just as a generic genius? Rushed but lush, with a nice touch of Victorian posthumanism for an original twist. (Steampunk. 13-15)
THE DAY MY FATHER BECAME A BUSH
van Leeuwen, Joke Illus. by van Leeuwen, Joke Translated by Nagelkerke, Bill Gecko Press (104 pp.) $16.95 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-1-877579-48-6
Welcome to the world of ethnic warfare, from the dinner table to the battle lines, full of haunted landscapes and social relationships—and you are a young girl. The story involves a girl, the narrator, who is forced to flee her village as civil war ravages her unnamed country, one of those endlessly grinding tank wars, fueled by animosities stretching back 600 years but as fresh as today’s daisies in the combatants’ noses. Her father, a pastry chef, has joined his neighbors: “He had to go and help defend one side against the other even though he had friends who were on the other side.” kirkus.com
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The language is smart, innocent and full of surprising—but age-fitting—turns of phrase. The girl is sent to live with her estranged mother, across the border. On her way there, much on foot, often through dark forest, she meets a cast of characters who mirror all the bickering that’s tearing the country apart. The text makes all her emotions palpable (“My stomach was full of homesickness. There was no room for anything else”), fear above all, but it never overwhelms her, instead releasing sudden survival instincts that get her through. A brilliant, eerily engrossing evocation of war as it brushes up against youth—a harsh slice of the world during a mean piece of history. (Fiction. 9 & up)
THE MOMENT BEFORE
Vitello, Suzy Diversion Books (214 pp.) $16.99 | $4.99 e-book | Jan. 14, 2014 978-1-62681-167-6 978-1-62681-164-5 e-book After a popular cheerleader plunges to her death, her younger sister forges an unexpected relationship with the boy responsible. Brady’s sister Sabine died on the floor of their high school gym from a broken neck when she failed to complete a complicated flip. Brady and her family blame Sabine’s lift partner, Connor Christopher, for not catching her. But after Connor helps Brady with her car one wintry afternoon, she does an about-face and decides he’s not that bad a guy after all. Brady’s feelings about Connor are confirmed when Sabine’s cellphone voice mail reveals dark truths about her bright sister: Sabine was pregnant, her perfect boyfriend, Nick, verbally abused her, and Connor was the only one who knew. The question of what Brady will do with this information is complicated by the underdeveloped subplots of her parents’ deteriorating marriage, her loss of a prestigious school art prize, and her best friend Martha’s decision to date Sabine’s abusive ex. All of this leads to a bizarre climax in which Brady hurls some of Sabine’s cremains at Nick after he drugs and kidnaps Martha, obliterating any suspension of disbelief. While the initial premise is intriguing, the story is crippled by self-conscious dialogue, abrupt transitions and the fact that all relevant information is spelled out instead of shown. Overwrought and half baked. (Fiction. 13 & up)
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THE RULE OF THREE
Walters, Eric Farrar, Straus and Giroux (416 pp.) $17.99 | Jan. 21, 2014 978-0-374-35502-9 When Adam’s civilization falls, there’s no zombie plague or nuclear war—a computer virus destroys modern technology, and people do the rest. With no warning, all computers and cellphones shut off, cars die in the streets, and anything with a computer in it refuses to turn on. Adam checks in with his neighbor and family friend, Herb, a retired bachelor whose career involved top-secret work in foreign countries. Paranoid Herb straightaway works to maneuver Adam and his family so they are supplied and protected. Adam’s family isn’t helpless—his police-captain mother organizes patrols and keeps the situation from falling to complete chaos, taking Herb’s counsel on the extraordinary circumstances. Soon, their neighborhood has to restructure and wall itself off to survive, especially against organized, heavily armed raiders. Reticent Adam, who frequently witnesses the adults’ closeddoor proceedings, often gets lost in his silence, and Herb consistently steals the show. Otherwise, Adam and Herb make a good team, pairing youthful hope with calculating cynicism. Many of the most exciting moments involve student-pilot Adam’s homemade ultralight plane—noncomputerized and therefore still functional. The prose can be clunky, reading at times like a survivalist instruction manual disguised as dialogue—but the detailed content is more than worth it, capturing the nittygritty of rebuilding—and defending—civilization. Perfect for aspiring doomsday preppers and survivalists. (Adventure. 12 & up)
RUINS
Wells, Dan Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (464 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Mar. 11, 2014 978-0-06-207110-1 978-0-06-207112-5 e-book Series: Partials Sequence, 3 In the wake of one apocalypse, can humans and Partials, cloned supersoldiers, live together, or will the world end again? Kira Walker found a cure for the RM plague. The Partials think her DNA might hold the cure for their “expiration date,” the genetic trait that shuts their bodies down when they turn 20. The Partials held the last remnant of humanity hostage until Kira turned herself in for study (Fragments, 2013); when her biopsies yield no answers, she sets off to find unaligned Partials in hopes of finding a solution to the expiration date herself. Meanwhile, Samm, her Partial boyfriend, makes a startling discovery halfway across the country, and he sets out to find Kira and, he hopes, save both races. |
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However, a splinter group of humans plans to use a nuclear warhead to destroy the Partials. And two very different genetically modified scientists are stalking the survivors; one shaped like a monster is warning everyone, and another shaped like a man is intent on harvesting everyone to create a perfect future. Wells concludes his post-apocalyptic, action-packed trilogy with a literal bang and a lot of blood. Believable characters face tough moral choices, and though the end is tidy, the twists and treachery that get readers there are all the fun. It’s enjoyable alone but best read after the first two. Science (fiction) at the end of the world done right. (Science fiction. 14 & up)
SPLIT SECOND
West, Kasie HarperTeen (368 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 11, 2014 978-0-06-211738-0 978-0-06-211741-0 e-book Best friends Addie and Laila uncover secrets about their community and the development of supernatural abilities. Addie, having had her potential future in Dallas wiped from her mind in Pivot Point (2013), visits her father outside of the Compound, secret home to the paranormal community. Her path crosses with Trevor’s again, but this time, romance doesn’t come as easily. The Containment Committee has threatened her with a memory wipe if she tells anybody about the Compound, and her precognitive abilities are growing, causing headaches and moments where she loses control and slows down time itself. This time, West’s dual narrative technique weaves Addie’s story with Laila’s viewpoint. From snooping and reading the letter Addie wrote to herself, Laila learns that in the other, lost future, she gained the ability to restore memories, and she wants to acquire it now in order to restore Addie’s memory. This brings her to Connor, a handsome bad-boy who sells illegal enhancement programs and is immune to Laila’s considerable natural and paranormal charms. As analytical Laila investigates, she discovers increasingly troubling information about the Compound’s leadership—information that spells danger for the unknowing Addie. Although the climax passes a little too easily, the story effectively builds momentum that will leave readers pondering the questions it raises. A fast, smart thriller populated by lively characters. (Paranormal romance. 13 & up)
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PERFECT LIES
White, Kiersten HarperTeen (240 pp.) $17.99 | $10.99 e-book | Feb. 18, 2014 978-0-06-213584-1 978-0-06-213586-5 e-book Fia’s freed her sister, Annie, from the sinister Keane organization but at a high price: severing contact between them to maintain the fiction that Annie’s dead (Mind Games, 2013). Competing demands and desires further rend Fia’s tattered psyche: recruiting girls with paranormal abilities to be shaped by the Keane School while plotting its destruction and protecting the vulnerable—especially Annie, who’s blind. Without her sister to rely on, Fia grows increasingly dependent on James, who’s got issues of his own. Meanwhile, Annie can’t enjoy the freedom for which her sister sacrificed herself, not when her own visions point to a calamitous future. Always the more stable of the sisters, Annie’s equally determined to protect the vulnerable, including Fia, a task complicated by romantic entanglements and the choices they entail. The sisters’ alternating narration helps to modulate the tension, balancing Fia’s jittery, violent persona with Annie’s focused, levelheaded one. Fia’s emotional extremes verge on tiresome without quite crossing the line. White avoids sequel padding, keeping her tale lean and streamlined, and again makes skillful use of temporal shifts (readers are wise to keep track of dates and times) in constructing her suspenseful plot. If the narrative (it’s less a sequel than Mind Games’ second half) doesn’t explore new territory, there’s plenty in its template to hold readers fast. (Paranormal romance. 13 & up)
THE HAVEN
Williams, Carol Lynch St. Martin’s Griffin (224 pp.) $18.99 | $9.99 e-book | Mar. 4, 2014 978-0-312-69871-3 978-1-250-02253-0 e-book Shiloh lives with her fellow Terminals in a hospital that claims to protect them from the Disease that threatens them in this creepy dystopia about a doctor who uses children as commodities. As the story is told entirely from Shiloh’s limited point of view, readers only slowly discover the true reason the children live such a controlled existence inside Haven Hospital & Halls, established in 2020. They have an excellent diet and eat prodigious amounts of food. The facility includes a good school with caring Teachers. Principal Harrison may be stern, but he appears to care for them. They have nice rooms, shared with a few other children, and lovely grounds. They may not, however, leave. Frequently, during their dining-hall lunches, Dr. King calls for a child by name. That child then goes to Treatment, sometimes to kirkus.com
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“There’s nary a word wasted in this love letter to the power and beauty of individual words.” from the big word factory
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return, sometimes not. Blissfully ignorant Shiloh drops clues as to the hospital’s true purpose for readers, and eventually, even she learns the truth and joins a group of student rebels. Williams, who is developing quite a varied repertoire, manages the information meted out by her deluded narrator with great skill. The simple but gripping focus on only one aspect of her dystopia sheds light on a moral question that young readers will have no difficulty answering: Are all people created equal—or not? Deliciously enigmatic. (Dystopian thriller. 12 & up)
THE BIG WORD FACTORY
de Lestrade, Agnès Illus. by Docampo, Valeria mixtvision Digital $3.99 | Oct. 21, 2013 1.0; Oct. 21, 2013
SILVER
There’s nary a word wasted in this love letter to the power and beauty of individ-
Wooding, Chris Scholastic (320 pp.) $17.99 | $17.99 e-book | Mar. 25, 2014 978-0-545-60392-8 978-545-62191-5 e-book
ual words. In a “peculiar land” where people must “buy and swallow the words they want to speak,” a poor boy named Paul can’t afford to tell a girl named Marie that he loves her. Paul is up against a boy whose family’s wealth affords him the ability to use as many words as he likes. In the end, Paul’s mere three words—cherry, dust and chair—are enough to make Marie notice. The sweet and simple story, based on the traditional book Phileas’s Fortune (2010), is greatly enhanced by elegant animation and interaction. Deep reds highlight Marie and Paul’s story against the gray gloom of an industrial word factory that towers over their town. Words are cannily deployed as hidden extras. As the story opens, categories of words for sale, including “Obsolete Words” (dungarees, brume) and “Funny Words” (gewgaw, drizzle and of course, gobsmacked), float down as little slips of paper. The app otherwise brims with clever touches, such as a language game for sorting words into three available languages: English, German and French. There’s also a link to a six-minute video version of the story. Budding language nerds or anyone who’s a sucker for a humble little love story won’t have trouble finding the right word for this app: “delightful.” (Requires iOS 6 and above.) (iPad storybook app. 5-12)
When strange insects assault a remote boarding school in England, the kids try to save the day in this tense page-turner. As the new boy at school, Paul keeps a family tragedy a secret, but his experience in coping with it thrusts him into a leadership position when an unfamiliar, silver-colored beetle turns up on campus. Any creature bitten by the beetles, including humans, quickly grows a silver-colored outer shell and clearly loses thinking capacity, shuffling around and trying to scratch or bite others. As they proliferate, however, they develop a kind of collective intelligence and begin to work together to conquer the entire school. Barricaded in the science block, Paul and a few others fight a seeming losing battle against the creatures. While that fight provides enough suspense for the novel, Wooding deepens the narrative by developing highly distinctive characters. Caitlyn hates her supposed friend Erika, and that emotion will play a part in the later plot. Adam, the school bully, may finally find what he’s really been looking for during his fight. Most importantly, however, Paul will learn that his leadership abilities trump even those of the adults on the scene. Skillfully managed subplots keep the pages flying. It looks like the end of the world is nigh.... It’s just all kinds of white-knuckle fun. (Horror. 12 & up)
AWA, YOU DREAM TOO MUCH
Digout, Michel Illus. by Digout, Simon tapatap $3.99 | Oct. 25, 2013 1.0; Oct. 25, 2013
An African village child’s flights of imagination soar even higher thanks to exemplary art, narration and animation. The titular expostulation couldn’t be more wrong. Sitting comfortably in a patch of shade, young Awa observes that the new plaits in her hair look like baobabs—thus sparking a remarkable chain of free associations. Taps on highlighted words in her ruminations bring quick glimpses of hooting monkeys and other animals around a mighty tree, piranhas and a caiman splashing in the Amazon River, and also masklike “genies” |
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bobbing in and out of view with snatches of percussive rattling. Drawn with quick, scribbly pen strokes and bright digital paints, the rain forest scenes, the creatures within them and the skies overhead glow with colors—nearly always unexpected ones, such as a zebra that, with successive taps of the text, flashes stripes of intense green, purple and red. Adding cinematic touches, smooth pans and dissolves (almost all tap-activated) follow the twisting path of Awa’s reverie to a final close-up of her sleeping, smiling face. The designers avoid a common flaw by allowing the expressive audio reading, available in English or French, to be switched off without also turning off the animal noises and other background sounds. There is, however, no way to go back or start over without closing the app. Quibbles aside, a terrific depiction of a young mind slipping off into vivid daydreams. Young readers will be hard put not to follow. (iPad storybook app. 5-9)
FLUTTER Speech Activated Story
Gonzalez, Moises Illus. by Gonzalez, Moises Moises Gonzalez $0.00 | Oct. 29, 2013 1.0 .2, Nov. 7, 2013
A flight of butterflies is frustrated by a spider’s many webs, and users will find this story app just as frustrating as they try to trigger the speech-activated features. Spring is here, and the butterflies are flying to their favorite meadow by Sugar Creek. Rhyming text and soft digital art create a happy feeling. There is no narration for this story; instead, the animations are activated by readers’ voices. Regrettably, this app suffers from a host of problems. Grammatical errors—in part probably due to the need to suit scansion—are rife in this app and will pose comprehension difficulties for young readers. For instance, the butterflies are shocked to find that a spider has spun many webs among the flowers. “Just one we agreed, not this many that’s what we said.” Furthermore, the story misses an important opportunity to model conflict resolution. Instead of seeking compromise, the butterflies simply demand that Mr. Spider take down his webs. Young children know that this would never be successful—neither in nature nor on the playground. The speech-generated animations do not work smoothly or consistently, and readers may need to repeat a sentence several times before the screen changes. Unfortunately, this simple story with its interesting interactive concept fails to take flight, weighed down by inconsistent features and poor grammar. (Requires iOS 7 and above.) (iPad storybook app. 4-8)
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A RABBIT’S TALE
Ink Robin Ink Robin $0.00 | Nov. 14, 2013 1.0.1; Nov. 14, 2013
In Ink Robin’s retelling of the old chestnut, town mouse meets country mouse in the guise of city-dwelling Gordon the rabbit and his country cousin, Fox. In what could be a 1960s Hanna-Barbera production, both visually and storywise, Gordon is happily exhausted by life in the city, but when an invitation arrives to visit his cousin in the woodland, Gordon happily accepts. He arrives all geared up for the bright lights of the big woodland to find that one walks instead of taking a taxi, enjoys fireflies instead of the opera and dines wherever he hangs his floppy ears, as there are no restaurants. If modestly perplexed, Gordon is cool with the alternatives and knows he will miss the woodland when he leaves. Even a little dust-up with a bear doesn’t cause much of a ruffle in the pleasing waters of the countryside. Back in the metropolis, Gordon takes a moment to consider: “It’s a fun life, he thought. But it’s even better when you slow down. Just once in a while.” Fables lose a significant something when you can have your cake and eat it, too. Penner’s artwork is as sharp as a light switched on in the dark, and the simple interaction with the application is perfectly pleasant, but the predigested story doesn’t afford young readers the pleasure of thinking it over. Disappointing. (Requires iOS 6 and above.) (iPad storybook app. 3-6)
THE TROJAN WAR Kichigai Editions Kichigai Editions $1.99 | Oct. 12, 2013 1.3; Oct. 24, 2013
The app that launched a thousand yawns. The Trojan War is a central foundational tale of Western civilization—and a story that is exciting from beginning to end. Not so this rendering, which is indifferently written and engineered. The opening panel, for instance, sports a comma error and a lame joke in which, the proper virtual button having been pushed, Zeus and Poseidon identify themselves by name while Thetis, that alluring Nereid, says, “I am blushing.” It seems clear that the adapter hasn’t quite grasped the central themes of the Iliad: Why is Achilles so wrathful, anyway? Why did Helen take it on the lam with Paris? What is it about the House of Atreus that should surround it with such bad mojo? The creaky visuals don’t help. While the illustrations win some style points in their utilization of Greek vase motifs, the herky-jerky animation might remind geriatric readers of old cartoons, while younger readers—the intended audience, after all—will fail to be impressed, kirkus.com
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“The naïve-style artwork shines, from swaths of luminous color to spidery, Edward Gorey–esque linework….” from the big word factory
even when poor horse-taming Hector takes a spear in the chest. About the best use for the app, as it happens, might be to teach American readers a bit of British English, the medium the developer has used; thus, “Achilles comes face to face with the Queen of the Amazon in the scrum.” Thoroughly unsatisfactory, though filling a gap in the market that cries for a better product. (iPad classic app. 8-12)
clutch of three to seven eggs”; “A nocturnal mammal, the fox only hunts for its food at night”—and other interactive features that are minor (often maddening) adventures to find and deploy. It’s not much of a story, per se, more an associative exploration of sound. The gist of the matter is to pronounce “ex” like “x,” and not like “egg”: exactly, extraordinary, exuberant, exemplar and exceptional, for starters. It is set in a kingdom of waxy pastels with a kind of Yellow Submarine kookiness, and the interaction is vigorous without being frantic. The characters have a static feel that lend a dreamy quality to the proceedings, as does the general psychedelic tone, but this is far from solely eye candy, though it does go on for a very long time. Here’s one e-book that doesn’t lay an egg. (iPad enhanced e-book. 4-10)
THE ILLUSION MAKER La Souris Qui Raconte La Souris Qui Raconte $4.99 | Oct. 26, 2013 1.1.0; Nov. 13, 2013
A city has lost not only its magic, but its very spark of life in this pint-sized philosophical app. Eric lives in a city without color or joy, but it does have a lot of cars. And a subway, likewise. (There is a distinct French flavor here, but no one’s going to confuse this burg with Paris.) One day there is a bigger traffic jam than usual, caused by a clown taking an elephant for a stroll while conjuring a jungle to make it all look natural. The circus has come to town, but the mayor and the men in gray don’t like it, and the townspeople don’t care. The clown shows Eric how his secret illusion-making device works before having to flee the authorities. Eric fiddles with the device, the results of which slowly start awakening his fellow citizens. The mayor is so besotted with the new color and joy, he establishes a factory of far-fetched ideas and even invites the circus back to town. The naïve-style artwork shines, from swaths of luminous color to spidery, Edward Gorey–esque linework, and though the interaction is minimalist in character, what there is has a muted dazzle. The story, however, is in the driver’s seat; with each frame, readers must choose to toggle text and narration on. It’s a droll salute to the pursuit of happiness, easily digested but with a fair measure of sophistication. (iPad storybook app. 7-10)
BUT THAT WON’T WAKE ME UP!
Pacaña-Lumbao, Annie; Lumbao, Anelka Illus. by Flores, Liza Adarna House, Inc. $1.99 | Sep. 26, 2013 1.0; Sep. 26, 2013 This bilingual app from the Philippines gets high marks for graphics and presentation, but minor navigational glitches and bland storytelling keep it from soaring. Maya is getting ready for bed and asks her Nanay how she can wake up early the next day. What ensues is an endearing conversation between the two in which Nanay offers solutions and Maya replies to each one with, “But that won’t wake me up!” As the story progresses, Nanay’s tactics become more severe, progressing from whispering in Maya’s ear to pulling the sun through the girl’s bedroom window. This app has an unusual aesthetic and a unique technological approach. The characters, props and backgrounds function like a floating 3-D felt board, with a distinctive paper-doll feel. And while the animation and interaction aren’t necessarily mechanically or technologically impressive, they’re soothing. Navigation isn’t linear; sometimes scenes progress horizontally left to right, but there are some switchbacks and vertical page turns, which may confuse readers initially but helps to contribute to the gently meandering feel of the conversation. Swiping to turn the page doesn’t work if readers are touching an object or character, and there’s no index or way to get back home without either finishing the story or rebooting the app. The narrator enunciates and reads well, but her delivery is a bit dry, at least in English. A good storybook app that could be great with a few tweaks. (iPad storybook app. 2-6)
EGGMANIA
Maysonave, Sherry Illus. by Caliva, Denise Mania Tales $9.99 | Mar. 12, 2013 1.0; Mar. 13, 2013 You say potAHto, and I say potAto; you say eGGzactly and I say eXactly. You’re wrong, eggcept maybe if you’re from BAHston. OK, we’ll let you slide on the potato, but we have to call you on the “GG.” This is most definitely an amuse-as-you-instruct application from Maysonave, embedded with plenty of definitions of words such as umpteen, Chinook, perused, caviar and ransacked. There are also quick but complete fun facts—“Female crows typically lay a |
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JACK JONES
Pearson, Tom Illus. by Pearson, Tom Red Magpie $0.99 | Oct. 30, 2013 1.0; Oct. 24, 2013
In a tale that isn’t much more than a pretext for a set of simple exercises in dexterity and visual recognition, young Jack sets out to find animal friends. Said friends include a red, yellow and blue dragonfly that viewers are invited to pick out from a set of six differently colored ones and a three-eyed bat bobbing in a swarm of twoeyed fellows in a dark cave. There’s also a robot that needs to be assembled by dragging parts into place and several more figures hidden behind flickable rocks or otherwise waiting to be discovered. Jack and his new buddies are modeled as rounded, doughy forms in candy colors (a baby dinosaur and a yeti, both white, look like they’re made from marshmallow) and in the narration, speak with helium-high voices over snatches of tinkling music. In an odd disconnect, though, the lad’s vampirically pointed teeth and black eyes lend a faintly macabre look to the cartoon art. A dark-skinned character sitting by a pond of variously colored fish has wide, contrasting lips; it’s another unfortunate visual choice and should perhaps be addressed in an update. Moreover, some page turns require completing a task such as exploring every side tunnel in an underground maze, and switching off the audio track also turns off the many touch-activated sound effects. Interactive features aplenty, though they hang from a thin storyline and some problematic illustrations. (iPad storybook app. 6-8)
PETER PAN
Randall, Nicolas Illus. by Calero, Miguel; Diaz, Luis Media Minds $0.00 | Oct. 9, 2013 Series: Touch of Classic 1.0; Oct. 9, 2013 This take on J.M. Barrie’s classic has a few navigational challenges and isn’t going to win any awards for being exceptionally artistic or innovative. But it’s pretty good for free. Since the story needs no introduction or explanation, the best place to begin is with what’s good about this offering from Spain. The narrator is easy on the ears, and the flow is solid, though the adapted text has little magic. Some interactions are fairly noteworthy: Readers can twirl the topographic Earth while the children fly and help Peter find his shadow. Many of the pages cannot be advanced until a puzzle is solved—help Peter hide from Mrs. Darling, for example, or help Tinkerbell give the Darling children pixie dust so they can fly. The biggest plus here is that the characters are loosely based on designs 132
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created by children from ages 5 to 16. But there are a few substantial glitches too. Narration isn’t optional, and there’s no explanation on what the fairy box at the top of the screen means (or how it’s populated.) On the “paper doll” screen, where readers must dress Tinkerbell in a complete outfit before turning the page, she looks like a zombie/hoochie hybrid, which is a little disturbing. In fact, the bug eyes and rictuslike smiles that prevail throughout are pretty unpleasant from an aesthetic standpoint. Does it soar? Occasionally it floats but not with flying colors. (iPad storybook app. 3-6)
ABCDIVERSITY
Ruegenberg, Martin SCA AB $0.99 | Oct. 9, 2013 1.3; Nov. 6, 2013
Assembled as an introduction to physical diversity, cartoon images of 26 children in name order sport a broad range of dress, skin tones, facial features, foods, disabilities and playthings. From “A is for Alyssa” to “Z is for Zaahid,” the smiling children—drawn one per screen in similar styles by an international cast of illustrators—sit or stand on plain white backgrounds next to captions printed in large hand-drawn script. A narrator enunciates each patterned line. There is no animation, but tapping four selected items in each picture (three for X, Y and Z) results in more printed and spoken words: “Gareth,” for instance, wears “Glasses” and holds on to a “Guide Dog” and a “Gift” near a bowl of “Grapes.” As these children are clad, mostly, in western European dress and associated with no ethnic or national markers more specific than their names, readers are left free to think about or discuss them in either local or globespanning contexts. Still, the app is plagued both by design issues, such as the lack of any way to go forward or back more than one letter at a time, an audio track that cannot be switched off, and the relegation of associated enrichment activities to the app’s website. Some readers might also question word choices like “Queen Crown” in “Q” and, in “X,” “X-Mas,” which is nonetheless pronounced as “Christmas.” Worthy of mission, somewhat ragged of execution. (linked website for parents/caregivers; requires iOS 6 and above) (iPad alphabet app. 6-10)
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“In a particularly nice touch, the beachgoers are depicted with a variety of skin tones.” from at the beach
continuing series
AT THE BEACH
Simons, Wouter Illus. by de Haan, Mieke W Simons $2.99 | Oct. 10, 2013 1.1.1; Oct. 27, 2013
SHOWDOWN AT THE ALAMO
Mick and his family enjoy a day at the beach in this simple book app for young readers. It’s the summer holidays, and Mick’s family is enjoying a camping trip near the seaside. He and his father head to the beach to swim in the ocean and play in the sand. The clear, simple language will appeal to beginning readers: “The sea is far away but Mick can hear the waves. He wants to play in the water.” Unfortunately, this app does not include word highlighting, tapping on words or appropriate font size—common features that are very useful for children learning to read independently. When readers tap the words in this app, they simply hear the text for the entire page repeated. The appealing digital cartoon art conveys the happy, relaxed feeling of the family’s leisurely day at the beach. In a particularly nice touch, the beachgoers are depicted with a variety of skin tones. Even though the app is produced by a Dutch company and translated into English, it is only available in English in this version. Interactive features are also simple, so much so that readers may wonder when they should tap and when the images are static. Although the artwork is appealing, this trip to the beach isn’t worth the drive. (iPad storybook app. 4-7)
Brown, Jeff Illus. by Pamintuan, Macky Harper/HarperCollins (112 pp.) $15.99 | $4.99 paper | Dec. 23, 2013 978-0-06-218988-2 978-0-06-218-987-5 paper Series: Flat Stanley's Worldwide Adventures, 10 (Adventure. 6-10)
CHOMP OF THE MEAT-EATING VEGETABLES
Cummings, Troy Branches/Scholastic (96 pp.) $4.99 paper | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-545-55299-8 Series: Notebook of Doom, 4 (Light horror. 8-10)
CLARK THE SHARK DARES TO SHARE
Hale, Bruce Illus. by Francis, Guy Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $17.99 | Dec. 31, 2013 978-0-06-227905-7 Series: Clark the Shark (Picture book. 4-8)
JUST GRACE AND THE SUPER SLEEPOVER Harper, Charise Mericle HMH Books (208 pp.) $15.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-544-04584-2 Series: Just Grace, 11 (Fiction. 6-9)
PINKALICIOUS AND THE PERFECT PRESENT
Kann, Victoria Illus. by Kann, Victoria Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $16.99 | $3.99 paper | Jan. 21, 2014 978-0-06-218789-5 978-0-06-218788-8 paper Series: Pinkalicious (Early reader. 4-8)
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BEWARE OF BOYS
JUST MY LUCK!
London, Kelli Dafina (288 pp.) $9.95 paper | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-7582-8701-4 Series: Charly's Epic Fiascoes, 4 (Fiction. 12-16)
O'Connor, Jane Illus. by Glasser, Robin Preiss Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) $16.99 | $3.99 paper | Dec. 23, 2013 978-0-06-208314-2 978-0-06-208313-5 paper Series: Fancy Nancy (Early reader. 4-8)
STAGE FRIGHT
Lubar, David Illus. by Loveridge, Matt Branches/Scholastic (96 pp.) $4.99 paper | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-545-49608-7 Series: Looniverse, 4 (Fantasy. 7-10)
DEADLY
Shepard, Sara HarperTeen (320 pp.) $17.99 | Dec. 23, 2013 978-0-06-219974-4 Series: Pretty Little Liars, 14 (Chick lit. 14 & up)
S IS FOR SEA GLASS
THE JOURNEY THROUGH TIME
A Beach Alphabet Michelson, Richard Illus. by Ettlinger, Doris Sleeping Bear (32 pp.) $15.95 | Jan. 1, 2014 978-1-58536-862-4 Series: Sleeping Bear Alphabets (Picture book. 5-8)
Stilton, Geronimo Scholastic Paperbacks (320 pp.) $14.99 | Jan. 28, 2014 978-0-545-55623-1 Series: Geronimo Stilton (Adventure. 7-10)
FIELD TRIP
Nees, Susan Branches/Scholastic (80 pp.) $7.99 paper | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-545-43854-4 Series: Missy's Super Duper Royal Deluxe, 4 (Fiction. 5-7)
This Issue’s Contributors # Alison Anholt-White • Kim Becnel • Elizabeth Bird • Marcie Bovetz • Sophie Brookover Louise Brueggemann • Connie Burns • Timothy Capehart • Ann Childs • GraceAnne A. DeCandido • Dave DeChristopher • Elise DeGuiseppi • Lisa Dennis • Carol Edwards • Brooke Faulkner • Laurie Flynn • Omar Gallaga • Laurel Gardner • Judith Gire • Faye Grearson Melinda Greenblatt • F. Lee Hall • Heather L. Hepler • Megan Honig • Jennifer Hubert Shelley Huntington • Kathleen T. Isaacs • Laura Jenkins • Betsy Judkins • Deborah Kaplan Joy Kim • K. Lesley Knieriem • Megan Dowd Lambert • Angela Leeper • Peter Lewis • Lori Low • Wendy Lukehart • Meredith Madyda • Joan Malewitz • Hillias J. Martin • Michelle H. Martin PhD • Gregory McNamee • Shelly McNerney • Kathie Meizner • Daniel Meyer • Deb Paulson • John Edward Peters • Susan Pine • Rebecca Rabinowitz • Kristy Raffensberger • Nancy Thalia Reynolds • Erika Rohrbach • Ronnie Rom • Leslie L. Rounds • Ann Marie Sammataro • Mary Ann Scheuer • Dean Schneider • Stephanie Seales • Paula Singer • Robin Smith Karin Snelson • Rita Soltan • Jennifer Sweeney • Deborah D. Taylor • Monica Wyatt
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These titles earned the Kirkus Star:
Altshul, Victor CreateSpace (62 pp.) $10.00 paper | Mar. 11, 2013 978-1-4818-9756-3
FUTURE PROMETHEUS by J.M. Erickson........................................139 SIGNAL GRACE by T. M. Yates.........................................................150
A sensitive, precise and moving first offering from a poet of real promise. For 50 years, Altshul has practiced psychiatry in New Haven, Conn., and now, in the autumn of his life, he’s published his first book of poetry. If he’s half as good a therapist as he is a poet, he must have some extremely healthy patients, for this is as accomplished a debut collection as readers are likely to find. He is, as he calls his old friend Charlie, “the real deal,” and in his verse, he does what Charlie does: “he’d never use a second syllable / where one would do.” Like all good poets, Altshul knows that words are valuable and ought to be spent wisely, and he brings this standard of care to topics both high-flown and mundane. In “Wotan,” a tongue-in-cheek ode to a character from Richard Wagner’s operatic Ring cycle, he reflects on the god’s vexed relationship with his daughter while also exploring the nature of parenthood: “Maybe we are / all a bit better than those who bore us. / I like to think that I exceed / my progenitors in goodness, / as bad as you are, I have no doubt / that you are better than your creator, / but that’s not saying all that much.” There’s so much for readers to enjoy here, from the unpretentious alliteration in the second line—bit, better, bore—to the light-touch critique of Wagner himself (Wotan’s “creator”) later on. Refusing to wax bombastic, Altshul trusts his readers to know, or discover, that Wagner was an anti-Semite and a hero to Hitler. He also addresses smaller, domestic topics with equal skill and grace, as in “Standpipe,” a capable piece of observation that turns a drainage tube into a metaphor for missed communications: “The standpipe is merciless, taunting. / We are listening carefully to each other, / but we cannot seem to agree on the water level, / on what is standpipe, what reflection.” A mature poetic effort from a sure-handed rookie.
SIGNAL GRACE
Yates, T. M. Self (216 pp.) $11.95 paper | $5.99 e-book Jun. 1, 2013 978-0-9892232-0-1
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he waxes nostalgic for this small but crucial food (“not just a side dish…a staple”) and recalls the care his mother took when preparing them. Three-year-old Bonner’s love for them was so strong, in fact, that he once bit into a doorknob, convinced that the white porcelain was actually a biscuit. He suffers another injury in “Keeping Me in Stitches,” which outlines an innocent family outing to the beach that ended with the author in the hospital. But this collection of memories is not all painful; as Bonner points out, “the simplest pleasures are surely the sweetest ones,” and he writes of the Christmas fun he and his siblings had with the boxes their presents came in and of the birth of his new baby cousin. Throughout, the author captures the slow, easy pace of Southern living, dwelling on the day-to-day activities of a young boy who’s encouraged to find adventure all around him. He also recalls less pleasant times, such as when his mother spanked him once at the grocery store for misbehaving, but these memories are always recounted in a context of love and trust. Overall, these brief anecdotes are candid, humorous and enjoyable. The author’s ability to see the bright side of any situation makes for a pleasant, undemanding read, and he recreates these stories of his siblings and extended family with loving detail, in straightforward, precise prose. Bonner shows a reverence for his youth that’s contagious; as he aptly puts it, he and his siblings “were poor kids living a rich life.” A sweet, gentle book that captures a man’s youth in all of its wonder.
Berger, G.J. Manuscript (383 pp.) In Berger’s (South of Burnt Rocks— West of the Moon, 2012) epic historical fiction, a young elephant driver from India fights in Hannibal’s army as it marches toward Rome. When a Syrian caravan visits his small Indian village in 227 B.C., young Ashoka, who’s known for his talent with elephants, is sold into slavery by his father in an effort to protect his family. Ashoka’s strong sense of duty carries him through a harrowing trip across the desert, and after a display of his elephant skills, he’s eventually sold to a Carthaginian senator who orders him to train his elephants for war. The novel follows Ashoka as he’s sold a second time into Hannibal’s army and eventually becomes head mahout, or elephant driver. A treat for ancient history buffs, the novel would especially appeal to fans of TV shows like Spartacus and Rome. Presented mostly from Ashoka’s point of view, the war is seen through the eyes of an Indian slave, conscripted into a war against his will. Nonetheless, highly intuitive and intelligent Ashoka is able to see the war clearly, and he lives to protect his precious elephants. Unlike the zealots in each opposing army, he recognizes that there’s no real good or evil; the Romans and Carthaginians are equally capable of committing atrocities, and though loyal to his commander, Ashoka is not burning with rage against Rome. He serves as a reminder that armies are often made up of reluctant participants. Spanning more than a decade and far from being a tired history lesson, the story flows naturally and never feels rushed. It’s full of interesting facts about Hannibal’s march to Rome, fortified by Berger’s simple yet rich descriptions of battles and the struggles of war. However, Ashoka’s nuanced, personal narrative drives the novel. Though a slave, he never sacrifices his beliefs, and he’s often outspoken with his masters—a habit that earns him disdain from some, though he’s ultimately rewarded for his moral courage. A highly entertaining, sophisticated look at the Second Punic War through the eyes of an unlikely hero.
TAHOE CHASE An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller
Borg, Todd Thriller Press (351 pp.) $16.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-931296-21-2 In Borg’s (Tahoe Trap, 2012) latest thriller, Owen McKenna is back in action trying to solve the murder of an elderly woman. Joe Rorvik was once a world-famous ski racing champion, even capturing the gold medal for the United States at the Winter Olympics. Now well into old age, he lives in a beautiful mountainside home near Lake Tahoe in Nevada. The bliss of Joe’s golden years is suddenly destroyed in an afternoon when his wife, Cynthia, falls off their porch and winds up in a serious, likely fatal coma. The police think it’s an accident, but Joe knows better: Someone tried to murder her. Trouble is, he doesn’t know who did it, and he doesn’t know why. That’s when he turns to detective Owen McKenna and his Great Dane, Spot, to uncover the truth about his beloved wife’s demise. Before long, Cynthia’s friends start turning up dead, too—also from curious “accidents.” McKenna soon finds that all the victims have a common thread: They oppose the development of a new, expensive ski resort right in their backyards. While McKenna scrambles to find the killer and bring some peace to Joe and the other victims, he discovers that Cynthia has one remaining
I TALK SLOWER THAN I THINK Bonner, C. D. C.D. Bonner (138 pp.) $14.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Aug. 28, 2012 978-0-9857950-0-9
A debut memoir that bursts with Southern flavor and charm. Bonner recounts the lively antics of his rural Georgia childhood in the 1960s and ’70s in this pleasant book. In each chapter, he provides a brief slice of Southern life with all the trimmings; for example, in “The Importance of Biscuits,” 136
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friend, Simone Bonnaire. Though Simone lives in constant fear of her abusive boyfriend, she’s yet to take a stance on the ski resort. Thinking he’s helping her escape, McKenna convinces Simone to take a grueling ski trip through the desolate wilderness, only to realize he’s put her squarely in the path of the murderer, and he has no way to warn her. From that point forward, the chase is on. This is the 11th installment of the Owen McKenna thriller series, so at this stage, Borg has solid command of his character and a fully realized sense of his personality, which readers will enjoy. The landscape is also beautifully crafted, perhaps leading readers to feel like they’re curled by the fire as the snow comes down. The prose can be clunky at times, though, with bits of cliché—“Cynthia’s heart beat so bad that it hurt”—but the pace builds nicely and doesn’t let up once it gathers steam. A worthy follow-up in the long, enjoyable series of McKenna mysteries.
between the dryad and her tree by showing parts of the dryad as translucent, and her depiction of the dryad’s grief at the death of the son might summon tears. The strong offering of a bittersweet new folk tale with striking illustrations.
OUTSIDE LANDS
Brunicardi, David Wasteland Press (116 pp.) $7.95 paper | $0.99 e-book | Jun. 10, 2013 978-1-60047-872-7 This cohesive debut collection of seven stories, most taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area, revolves around the notion of rescue. When nature is out of whack, humankind tends to pay the price. In these stories, as toxic landscapes pose a threat to individuals and communities, several characters undergo grotesque transformations or enter virtually catatonic states. In “Wawona,” a teenage girl unable to move after a surfing accident finds herself stuck in the back of her panicked boyfriend’s truck. Another predominant motif centers on water in a variety of forms: ocean, reservoir, rain, mist, fog; in Brunicardi’s narratives, this normally life-giving substance becomes volatile and dangerous. The title character of “The Quickening of Ethan Boyd” comes into contact with a contaminated stream and slowly slips into an altered state of being. In the final lines, a touching farewell to his beloved wife takes a bizarre turn and suggests a bloody, chaotic aftermath: “My sulfurous teeth await your soft shoulder.” In a compact space, the author constructs well-paced narratives with adequate character development and mounting suspense. For instance, descriptions of the elderly couple under siege in “Mountainous”—“Gordon looked at his wife of forty one years. She seemed so small and frail standing there in the middle of the room, like a frightened animal”—give readers a clear sense of the lifetime they have spent together and the sacrifices each partner is willing to make for the other as they confront demons. Not all of these tales rely upon fantastical elements to pack a punch. The most realistic story, “The Seeds of Antipathy,” is perhaps the hardest hitting. When his young son nearly drowns, Blake decides to face a tragic event from his past that he has unsuccessfully tried to forget. Boarding a plane, “He began to doze and was immediately awakened by the gliss of a pearly clarinet as the airline’s adopted theme song was piped into the cabin.” In one of the book’s most haunting images, a clarinet case eerily floats on the water’s deceptively calm surface. A promising first effort, deliciously creepy and often moving.
THE WOODSMAN
Brennan, Shaun Illus. by Meganck, Margaux Shaun Brennan (48 pp.) $9.99 paper | Mar. 14, 2013 978-1-939792-00-6 Debut writer Brennan and illustrator Meganck create a touching folk story about the transformative powers of love. Despite his talents, a skilled woodsman is poor because his son is often very sick, and the family must spend all the woodsman’s earnings on medicine. To solve their financial problems, the woodsman travels into the center of the forest to find and cut down a heart tree, a rare tree that produces expensive wood. When the woodsman recognizes that the heart tree is the home of a dryad, he realizes he cannot cut it down; instead, they agree that the woodsman can carve the dryad’s tree as living art. When the woodsman returns home, his son insists that the woodsman carve the likeness of the dryad and that, despite his illness, he come along on the journey to the heart tree. When they arrive at the heart tree, the dryad, who doesn’t have the energy to show herself, is surprised to discover that the son can see her without effort. The son works for his father, describing the dryad’s beauty, all the while falling in love with her. As the woodsman’s work draws to completion, the son weakens and dies—but when his father buries him, a heart tree grows over the grave, and the son and the dryad are united. Brennan’s prose is by turns simple and poetic: “When they arrived at the glade and stood before the tree, the Son saw framed within the Heart Tree a glowing woman beautiful to behold, with leaves and flowers woven into her hair. She looked at him with acorn-brown eyes that were streaked with green, blue, and purple.” Though the word count is high for a picture book, grade school readers will be drawn in by the fairy-tale qualities of the writing and Meganck’s beautiful illustrations, with their soft palette and Polar Express–like allure. Meganck deftly portrays the connection |
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“A heartfelt exploration of Washington’s Christianity that will find an appreciative audience among both the faithful and the patriotic.” from the spiritual journey of george washington
BASEBALL, BULLIES & ANGELS
THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY OF GEORGE WASHINGTON
Cobb, Daryl K. 10 to 2 Children’s Books (288 pp.) $10.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Sep. 17, 2013 978-0-615-87923-9
Connell, Janice T. CreateSpace (246 pp.) $12.95 paper | Sep. 30, 2013 978-1-4895-8966-8
George Washington: soldier, patriot, president—saint? This book parses the founding father’s achievements through the lens of Christian theology, making some surprising observations along the way. Blending the mythical and the historical to convey the holiness of its subject, this book is neither strictly a history nor a biography. Connell (The Secrets of Mary, 2010, etc.) details apocrypha unaddressed in the work of mainstream biographers: Washington’s seemingly mystical imperviousness to musket fire, his supernatural vision at Valley Forge and, Connell argues, his deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Like most hagiographers, Connell begins with a committed belief that her subject is uniquely touched by God, and the book is largely a rhetorical exercise in proving the truth of that assumption. This becomes uncomfortable since, of course, Washington is not a saint recognized by the Catholic Church; many scholars agree he was not Catholic, either, though he was, in fact, a Mason—a significant aspect of his spirituality that goes unmentioned here. The worshipful tone of Connell’s prose—“history has canonized” Washington, she says, describing him as a “mystical icon of heroic grace”—may rankle secular readers as well as the true faithful, who might justifiably wonder if either the author or the subject can claim legitimacy to such assertions. Although Connell never actually classifies Washington as a saint or argues outright for his beatification, and she never describes his exploits as miracles, her point is nevertheless clear and in concert with Catholic theology: God, or “Kind Providence” (Washington’s preferred term), actively worked through the great leader and chose him to found the new nation by God’s grace. This conviction leads Connell to some observations about American political philosophy that will delight some readers and provoke others, not least of which is the assertion that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution are rooted in the Bible. But in the end, all serious scholars agree that Washington was, indeed, a devout Christian, and the primary source material Connell has gathered here—including little-examined oral histories that deal with his spirituality—make her book a valuable addition to existing scholarship. A heartfelt exploration of Washington’s Christianity that will find an appreciative audience among both the faithful and the patriotic.
This young-adult novel by Cobb (Greta’s Magical Mistake, 2011) introduces Stephen, whose skill in baseball helps him cope with bullies and a learning disability. In the small town of Lamington, N.J., nothing much happens. There are three different churches and no stoplights, and kids hang out at an ice cream place called the Dipper. Only Little League baseball enlivens the town. Stephen Miller, a 6-foot-2-inch seventh-grader who weighs 200 pounds, plays for the Lamington Giants. And he’s incredible. His brother Jack and best friend Charlie say he’ll play for the Yankees someday—if only he can learn to concentrate on anything else. In every class, Stephen compulsively relives ballgames in his head, frustrating his parents and teachers. Fellow students tease and bully him mercilessly—despite his large size—with embarrassing pranks (like sending pussy willow seeds to his home). Then, Megan Milton arrives in town. Stephen’s wealthy, warmhearted new classmate is from Connecticut and has an adorably crooked smile. She also had a severe bullying problem that prompted her move to Lamington. While she and Stephen grow closer, his own pack of tormentors plans its most humiliating stunt yet. Author Cobb brings home the supposed simplicity of small-town life with a patient eye: “During the day shopping gets done, dishes get washed, and houses get cleaned....” Stephen is a charming, funny narrator, and once he starts describing baseball games, this tale’s versatility begins to shine. Here’s his take on a particularly slow fastball: “I could have run to the snack shack, downed a couple of hotdogs, and still been back in time to catch [it].” Cobb’s long stretches of naturally engaging dialogue also help deliver characters and twists that positively outstrip stories merely about athletic glory. “I’m a nice guy,” says Stephen, “and that is who I want to be.” Rather than sounding trite, this statement is a rallying cry for those who must deal with bullies and don’t want to sink to their level. Always sincere, occasionally shocking, this tale is required reading for kids and parents.
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“Erickson artfully raises profound ethical and philosophical questions regarding class systems, gender equality, neurodiversity and what it means to be human.” from future prometheus
STATE OF UNION Book Two of The God Head Trilogy
FUTURE PROMETHEUS Emergence & Evolution - Novellas I & II
Davison, Sven Michael Bedouin Press (406 pp.) $25.95 | $19.95 paper | $4.99 e-book Oct. 16, 2012 978-0985552824
Erickson, J.M. Outskirts Press Inc. (266 pp.) $13.95 paper | $2.99 e-book Nov. 4, 2013 978-1-4787-0418-8
As a synthetic plague causes more and more humans to be implanted— “immunized”—with mind-control chips, ex-cop Jake “Jackhammer” Travissi, who survived his own digital zombification, fights the global conspiracy with his dwindling allies. The middle volume in author Davison’s cyberpunk God Head trilogy, after State of Mind (2011), sees LA cop Jake Travissi returning to a fearfully warped civilization in 2035 after having taken a sabbatical when he was reluctantly implanted with a neurological Chip that gave him enhanced crime-fighting mojo, information access and altered perceptions. The Chip also made him and fellow lawmen susceptible to a conspiracy of “God Head” hackers, turning them into mind-controlled assassins. Through superhuman willpower, Jake cut his own Chip from his head in the last book, but he was still powerless to prevent the murders of those closest to him. Now, vacationing on the resortcontinent Antarctica with his fiancee, Jake is plunged back into violence and techno-intrigues by the worldwide unleashing of a deadly, genetically modified virus called MaxWell. The only alleged defense against it is mandatory Chip implantation— rushed into practice by assorted world governments and the elite Consortium puppet masters behind them—that threatens to turn everyone into mindless “Pin Heads.” Vocal Christian and Muslim religious sects oppose the Chipping of humanity, yet evidence suggests that they may be heavily involved in terror plots against Travissi’s newfound allies, husband-and-wife Indian researchers seeking a MaxWell cure despite betrayals and impossible odds. Davison, also a screenwriter, writes on a broad canvas, with action hopping across hemispheres, corpses piling up in the millions and even nuclear weapons in play. Yet the Jackhammer (and his wonder dog, Lakshmi) stays as invulnerable as a Tom Cruise action hero, complete with six-pack abs—though there’s a potentially sinister explanation for his survival floated near the denouement. Amid the apocalyptic future-shock vibe of a desperate world engulfed by corrupt, out-of-control technological advances, Davison’s knack for crackerjack storytelling and dialogue holds the mayhem and melodrama together. Though slightly programmed around action-blockbuster tropes, this harrowing cyber–pulp fiction brings the thrills.
In Erickson’s (Eagle: Birds of Flight, 2013) dystopian sci-fi novel, a cryogenically frozen scientist wakes up in the year 2155 to find that he’s the only man in a matriarchal military state. In 2019, Lt. Jose Melendez is a scientist on the autism spectrum who uses himself as a test subject in his innovative cryogenics research. When a sudden, unrelated pandemic causes nearly all adult men on Earth to become violent, Melendez is one of the few who are unaffected, and he soon becomes the subject of military testing. His work in cryogenics takes on a new urgency as it may hold the key to keeping mankind alive. He’s frozen as part of an eight-month cryogenics test, but he isn’t thawed until more than 150 years later. His rescuers are four cybernetic “artificial persons” who have been expelled from society for exercising free will. In this future world’s matriarchal society, all male youths are similarly “cast out” of society when they reach puberty. Melendez and the APs learn that the government is actually murdering the boys, despite the long-ago eradication of the original pandemic, so they form a guerrilla-style group to try to stop the killings. Meanwhile, Maj. Mare Singh tries to stay focused on her military career but secretly spends all of her free time watching, through mirrored glass, the young son she was forced to give up. When she discovers that Melendez has implanted a computer virus into all APs, she soon learns of the murders, and she comes up with a plan of her own to save her son and the other boys. In this first, two-part installment of a planned series of novellas, Erickson artfully raises profound ethical and philosophical questions regarding class systems, gender equality, neurodiversity and what it means to be human. He draws on classical references, and especially literature, in his work, and readers will likely appreciate the way he beautifully weaves in references to Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells and other masters of science fiction. Overall, it’s dystopian literature at its finest. A gripping story featuring well-constructed characters, poignant moral dilemmas and a chillingly realistic dystopian future.
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REVEILLE IN HOT SPRINGS
Exarchos, Alex CreateSpace (98 pp.) $9.99 paper | $3.14 e-book May 29, 2013 978-1-4904-5753-6
Goulet, Mary Ellen CreateSpace (236 pp.) $20.00 paper | Jul. 16, 2013 978-1-4840-5398-0
A series of short testimonies by U.S. military veterans about their treatment at a Hot Springs, S.D., veterans facility. Freelance writer Goulet gathered this collection primarily as a reaction to the U.S. government’s announced decision in December 2011 to close the veterans hospital in Hot Springs and pull the plug on its good works. The shutdown would require veterans to seek help hours away without reimbursement of travel expenses. Government officials have cited economic considerations and the hospital’s outdatedness, but these stories show these reasons as misguided at best. Each of the vignettes is brief—typically five pages or so—but harrowing. Goulet often lets the veterans speak for themselves about their war experiences and their profound aftereffects—mostly alcoholism or some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, including anger issues, insomnia, memory loss, fear of crowds or loud noises, impatience or irritability. The author fashions the veterans’ words into engaging narratives without overpolishing them, giving a rattling, unvarnished rawness to the material. There are more than two dozen stories here from World War II, Korea, the Balkans and one Middle Eastern fiasco after another, as well as additional brief comments from both vets and community members. The veterans, mostly men, tell stories about the distress they’ve lived with for years, and it’s clear that without a close sanctuary such as the Hot Springs facility—which is shown to have had a gentle hand, an easeful pace and a personal touch—many lives would be diminished. “We believe if we don’t stop these closures here and now, then veterans will have no choice but to relocate to urban centers where the focus will be on VA convenience and not on veteran care,” the author writes. Shut the Hot Springs hospital down? Readers may come away from this collection believing that the government should be cloning it in every state. An infuriating, stinging rebuke to politicians who leave returning soldiers to their own devices.
Fantasy, sci-fi and the avant-garde combine to form this ambitious Pandora’s box of a novel that leaves its readers guessing, though they might not be sure which questions to ask. What happens in these pages is not easily described, but it’s even less easily explained. Divided into 10 wildly different sections, the book first begins in a Spartan room inhabited by a boy and an artifact as mysterious as the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The object resurfaces throughout the book. When the boy looks at the “medium size cubical silver box”—a precise description that’s still vague—his eyesight goes blurry, but turning away leads to abstract visions. Do the subsequent sections capture these visions or are we all trapped inside the box? What is certain is that this challenging, experimental novel has tremendous reach, moving from a city bus and spreading outward to the very hem of the universe, where even the laws of physics begin to fray. Among the mysterious objects, metaphysics and politics, genres and space-time bend; one scene is actually set within a Möbius strip. At times, the story feels intricately woven; at others, simply convoluted. Author Exarchos operates in the traditions of James Joyce and Julio Cortazar, daring readers to deduce meaning from what might be madness but what is often a maddening text. Though the story is as engaging and perplexing as an optical illusion, the language is alternately grand and pedestrian. In a section set inside a computer universe made from binary code, “Continuity is sacrificed on the altar of total flexibility. Abolishment of mediation makes chaos less sexy.” But in another section about old-world seafarers that echoes back to Ulysses (Homer’s version this time), the language slips a bit as a character reflects about his “childhood friend, his best buddy.” This looseness with language—sometimes academic, other times irreverent—might leave readers wondering what Exarchos’ intention truly was. As with the puzzling work of, say, David Lynch or Mark Rothko, the audience may wonder if they “get it” and whether there was ever anything to “get” at all. A confounding appetizer for the Uroboros, but perseverance may reveal important truths—that is, if there are actual truths to be revealed.
A DAY IN MEXICO CITY
Hagher, Iyorwuese AuthorHouse (204 pp.) $24.99 | $16.98 paper | $3.99 e-book Jun. 4, 2009 978-1-4389-4692-4 Outraged, sorrowful and occasionally hopeful post-colonial free verse that gives voice to the oppressed. In his unflinching debut, Hagher seeks to redeem the struggling African continent through the power of myth, song and poetry, but he finds it a rough go, even from the outset. Entertaining Homeric
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aspirations, he begins, “How can I write the epic / To celebrate your long forgotten history / And a new song of your heroes?” After cataloging his nation’s ills, though, he finds that both country and poetry are helplessly “[y]earning for lost unity.” “How then can I sing you a new song?” he asks. Hagher discovers challenges so deeply and systemically entrenched that neither action nor poetry seems to register amid the disastrous cacophony. With incredulity, he records the social pathologies that plague African countries, as in “Ballad of the Widow,” which personalizes cycles of self-defeating behavior by describing two men viciously and counterproductively fighting for the affections of a widow: “The quarrel was small / Their hate was big, bitter and strong / And now they sought to die / And double the widow’s plight.” Hagher both mocks and mourns the absurd fatalism of such cycles in the linguistic tautologies of “Dying in Africa’s Sudan” and the paradoxes of “Gbeji and Zaki-Biam.” Yet the problems are bigger than Africa. Economic and social inequalities afflict Mexican maids, too, who rank below even their hotel guests’ dogs: “Maids pray to Guadalupe for a miracle / To heal collapsed shoulder bags and heated muscles / Dogs see their doctors weekly for a fee.” Further, Africa is handicapped by the world’s gaze, symbolized by “wicked cameras” that “[s]ee nothing except flies sucking moisture / On mucus drenched nostrils of starving children.” Optimism is fleeting, and when it does appear, “hope flutters on the wing of a butterfly.” The epic of celebration and heroism is not fulfilled here, but the seeds of resurrection are sown in some of Hagher’s longer, more explicitly African pieces like “Ode to Gbaaiko Iyol” and “Predators of the Savannah,” in which the long arcs of African histories are revealed and celebrated. Ambitious yet aware of its own futility, Hagher’s project necessarily means poetry that is, by turns, bombastic, messy and opaque, but it can be remarkably powerful, too. Meaningful, edifying verse that tells of a beleaguered people.
find themselves at odds with the “Churchies,” such as the Department of Defense’s Defense Intelligence Agency, who use white magic to combat similar paranormal threats. Both secret groups are soon targeting Ethan Morgan, a former Chaos agent who is now using death magic. Morgan is seeking revenge for the death of his younger brother, a soldier killed in a secret DOD “Perfect Cleansing,” and he doesn’t care who else dies in the process. He has an intricate plan to make himself so powerful that all the forces of good can’t stop him. The novel focuses on the search for Morgan and leads to a pitched conflagration at Arlington National Cemetery from which few walk away unscathed. Hamlet, an admitted, longtime slinger of red tape, does a masterful job of transforming mundane bureaucracy into a supernatural battleground. He has ably fused the disparate genres of political thriller and zombie apocalypse into one book that will satisfy fans of either—no mean feat. Best of all, Hamlet has set himself up to write more such tantalizing hybrids. A rampaging read with memorable characters that proves to be a promising first installment of a planned series.
THE SEED & OTHER FAIRY TALES
Hillenbrand, Joseph Amazon Digital Services (110 pp.) $21.99 paper | $0.99 e-book Sep. 8, 2013 978-1-4936-8356-7 Dark fairy tales populated by ogre mothers, wicked gods and traitorous frog queens fill Hillenbrand’s well-written, beautifully illustrated debut story collection. The collection opens with “The Seed,” the story of a very unconventional family: a single mother, her bright daughter, Caroline, and Caroline’s guardian ghost, who ultimately helps her save herself from violent death. Other stories about failed quests and generous souls who come to bad ends emphasize the dangers of magic and trust. In both “The Seed” and “Applebite,” the collection’s two longest stories, the female protagonist triumphs, but there’s a sense that the victory comes with a cost, and readers may wonder how the women will cope with their successes after the stories end. In “Applebite,” for example, a woman confronts her god with magic, ultimately subsumes him and becomes a greater power herself. “Sand Castles,” a tale about a soldier who’s willing to sacrifice his life to bring peace to his kingdom, shows the futility of his gesture when the soldier’s companion seeks revenge, sparking the war to an even higher conflagration. Although a sense of pessimism pervades most of the stories, “Calimire” alone celebrates hope. In it, human John travels to the land of Calimire, ruled by froglike creatures, to aid the queen in assassinating her husband on the promise that he’ll become the next king. However, John has second thoughts about his agreement and seeks solutions beyond those he’s offered. By trusting in hope and love, he saves both Calimire and himself.
HAND OF CHAOS
Hamlet, J. CreateSpace (312 pp.) $11.49 paper | $2.99 e-book | Sep. 4, 2013 978-1-4848-6269-8 In this rollicking debut novel, Hamlet successfully transforms bureaucratic infighting into an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil. At the heart of the action is Anna Wei, a member of the National Security Agency’s Division of Unconventional Weaponry and Tactics, a kind of supernatural SWAT team. Like too many young women in the Washington, D.C., area, Wei is married to her job, although she hooks up occasionally with a striking half-vampire. Hers is not the healthiest lifestyle, as she and her Chaos squad mates employ black magic and enchanted weapons to battle the undead, such as ghouls and vampires. Her co-workers include an immortal and cursed paladin, a Nigerian shaman, a bookish shape-shifter, a brilliant, cranky wizard, and an inept summoner. DUWAT members often |
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Quantum Leap Kirkus’ Senior Indie Editor Evaluates the Year in Self-Publishing By Karen Schechner Self-publishing is growing at time-warp speed—422 percent since 2007, according to Bowker. This past year, Kirkus Indie reviewed more than 3,600 books. Instead of going solo, self-pubbed writers are becoming micropublishing houses and hiring a team to edit, copy edit and design their books. Businesses are developing and expanding to fill indie authors’ needs. The production values of indies have gotten better. Glossy, full-color art books are becoming more common, including Jean-Pierre Weill’s unusual, beautifully illustrated The Well of Being, based on the philosophy of an 18th-century Italian Jewish mystic. Excellent sci-fi titles were always part of the self-pubbed world, but now we’re seeing more literary titles, some of which are making their ways to the traditionally published side, like Sergio de la Pava’s A Naked Singularity. There’s no shortage of well-done noir. Kirkus Reviews called the Hollywood Murder Mysteries series by Peter S. Fischer, the co-creator of Murder, She Wrote, addicting and thrilling. Many independent booksellers responded early to the rise in self-publishing and have been watching and participating in its ascendance. “One of the changes that I’ve seen is a move toward ‘indie-publishing’ rather than ‘self-publishing,’ ” says General Manager Paul Hanson of Village Books in Bellingham, Wash. “The distinction is that in self-publishing, authors try to do much of the work themselves. Indie publishers know when to hire professionals to help them do the work that the authors can’t (or shouldn’t) do themselves.” As quality has improved, some writers are finally grabbing the attention of mainstream publications. “Local media is becoming more interested in writing about self-published local authors than before,” according to Casey Coonerty Protti, the owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz, Calif. “That means 142
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that self-published authors are getting more traction than ever before.” The local news coverage benefits both authors and the bookstores stocking their works. Not every bookstore is on board, however. Often, indie booksellers encounter self-pubbed writers who don’t understand that shelf space is at a premium. Hut Landon, the executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, says, “The bookstores that have established programs for self-published authors (Bookshop Santa Cruz is a good example) seem to manage it well. For others, it’s hit or miss. Authors often don’t understand why booksellers won’t carry their book…their understanding of how a bookstore makes business decisions can be lacking.” In Colorado, the Boulder Book Store has an established consignment program and works well with their local authors. “We treat the author like a publisher and allow them the same access that the publishing houses have,” says Liesl Freudenstein, a buyer and consignment coordinator at the store. “I think that the au|
thors/publishers appreciate this and realize that they also must behave professionally.” In fact, Bookshop Santa Cruz modeled their consignment program on Boulder Book Store’s, and it has become a profit center in just a year and a half. They sell tiered promotional packages and other services, including graphic design, layout and cover design, ebook conversion and social media marketing support. “Now we can offer services from the writing of the book all the way through supporting it in the marketplace,” says Coonerty Protti. Village Books’ manager Paul Hanson credits the store’s success with their personal service and a buffet of options for authors. If an author does get her book on the shelves of a local bookstore, there’s still the hurdle of distribution if the book is to have any legs. “It’s the issue that I deal with the most when self-pubbed authors call our office,” says NCIBA’s Landon. To simplify the issue of distribution for both print and e-books, Ingram Content Group launched IngramSpark this past July. “For print titles, a publisher uploads PDF files and for e-books, an EPUB file,” explains Robin Cutler, IngramSpark Manager. “When titles are validated and in the IngramSpark system, books are available for order from more than 39,000 retailers.” Indie bookstores can help with distribution too. Village Books produces perfect-bound books for authors’ books in-house—short runs or hundreds at a time—for local distribution, and they can assist their authors with national distribution for e-books and print books via Kobo and other distributors. Other corners of the industry are also responding to a maturing indie market. Agent Rita Rosencranz, who’s sold 14 self-pubbed books to publishing houses, says that “more agents and publishers are trawling selfpublishing sites to recruit successful authors….I think the wall between traditional and self-publishing will be even more permeable, with even more established authors going it alone for pet projects that their publishers aren’t interested in acquiring.” Author Neal Pollack’s experience certainly speaks to that permeability. He went from traditional to selfto (sort of) traditional publishing. “My last published fiction with a big house had been a commercial disappointment, so it was obvious that I wasn’t going to get an advance or a contract,” he says. “But I believed in myself as a fiction writer even if no one else did.”
So, Pollack self-pubbed Jewball, a novel about a 1930s New York Jewish basketball team, and sold 500 copies. “It didn’t exactly catch fire,” he says. The novel seemed to be at a dead end. He contacted Amazon Publishing, which republished it with no advance but with a full royalty structure. Amazon Publishing also reedited, redesigned and rereleased the book, which sold more than 10,000 copies in the U.S. He’s currently under contract with Amazon to write a sequel. Pollack recommends self-publishing: “I wouldn’t do it without an editor, though. If you self-publish, you need to do it professionally, with pride. Don’t half-ass it.” But he underscores the perennial problem of discoverability. Without Amazon’s marketing muscle, he would “just be another noodle in the content soup,” he says. “But I wouldn’t discourage anyone from trying. It’s a legitimate way to break in, and I fully credit self-publishing with revitalizing my dead fiction-writing career.” The collective effect of self-publishing could bolster more than individual writers’ careers. With all of those self-pubbed authors sitting down to complete a noir novel, literary memoir, World War II history or YA intergalactic paranormal adventure, they’re making an impressive commitment to the discipline of writing. They’re developing characters, fine-tuning their plots and prose, and researching their subjects, which can only lead to more book buying and a stronger community of arts and letters. Karen Schechner is the senior indie editor at Kirkus Reviews.
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THE PUMPKIN EATER A Sam Dawson Mystery
The collection features illustrations from nine different artists, and the varying styles suit the tales. Unfortunately, Hillenbrand also changes the typeface for each story, and several are difficult to read—a problem that may be overcome in some digital formats. Enjoyable fairy tales for readers who prefer dark and eerie to happily ever after.
Horn, Steven W. Granite Peak Press (370 pp.) $26.95 | $16.95 paper | Oct. 31, 2013 978-0-9835894-1-9 A photographer taking pictures of gravestones uncovers evidence of a horrifying crime in this mystery novel. Colorado photographer Sam Dawson sums up his life this way: “Divorced, no close friends, obsessed with his career, and only a dog for companionship.” Ten years ago, he was too busy to visit his dying mother; now, as some kind of absolution, he’s taking pictures of tombstones in her hometown of Oxford, Iowa. Sam uncovers eerie likenesses between the Iowa cemetery and one thousands of miles away in Cambridge, Colo. For example, Eugene Eris, a doctor, is buried in each, 18 months apart with the same birth dates and the same mysterious epitaph: “Wellborn Are My Children.” Even the gravediggers for both sites look like twins. Ignoring threats and trying to romance a beautiful genetics researcher, Sam digs through dusty file folders, computerized records and layers of bureaucracy as he zeros in on Dr. Eris’ place in the early-20th-century eugenics movement—and his hideous crimes. Horn (Another Man’s Life, 2012, etc.) has constructed a truly unsettling mystery backed by indepth knowledge of science, Colorado bureaucracy and politics, and history. Who knew, for example, that a eugenics section of the State Board of Stock Inspection was still part of Colorado law? The pieces fit together well; e.g., an inherited genetic condition serves both to put Sam’s daughter in danger and to reveal the ironic tragedy of Eris’ schemes. Horn’s characterization, dialogue and pacing are solid. He makes the wise decision to set the novel in 1999, so plot points aren’t simplified by current technology. These days, Sam’s discoveries could have easily gone viral, but that would have given the story a different ending. A few creaky tropes from mystery thrillers can be found here: not calling the police because “who’s going to believe this wild story?”; the untrustworthy girlfriend; the bad guys hurting Sam emotionally and predictably. Horn plans further Sam Dawson mysteries, and criticisms aside, readers will look forward to the next outing. Dramatic and intelligent, this is a smart start to a new detective series.
A BUTTERFLY’S JOURNEY Healing Grief After the Loss of a Child Hopkinson, Barbara J. Xlibris (270 pp.) $29.99 | $19.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Apr. 18, 2013 978-1-4797-9527-7
Part memoir, part self-help treatise, Hopkinson’s debut book chronicles her son’s death and the grief that nearly de-
stroyed her own life. Hopkinson’s memoir begins when her 21-year-old son, Brent, was killed in a motorcycle accident on the campus of his Arizona university. He had borrowed a friend’s bike, although he wasn’t trained to ride it. At a stop sign, the bike stalled and Brent accelerated to keep it in gear, unintentionally catapulting himself forward and hitting a wall behind the school’s library. Hopkinson tells the story in vivid, excruciating detail, revisiting her son’s death and the stages of mourning that gripped her in its aftermath. She opens a window into her emotional life, from the phone call in which she learns of the accident to her trip to Arizona, the decision to take him off life support, and then then the return trip to her Massachusetts home to plan his funeral. After the initial shock of Brent’s death, Hopkinson’s depression deepened. Her marriage of 30 years dissolved; she contemplated suicide. She finally found solace in what she calls spirituality, which for her involves meditating daily and seeking mediums to communicate with Brent and assure her that his spirit is still with her. The story is heartfelt and deeply touching, but it is awkwardly paired with a self-help component that makes the narrator’s voice vacillate between memoirist and educator. In her introduction, Hopkinson details Elisabeth KublerRoss’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. At the end of each chapter, she includes a “reflection” that explains the stages she went through and reads like a workbook in managing grief. Within the chapters, the narrative occasionally veers into the role of instructor, sometimes directly addressing the reader and offering advice. Sometimes, the narrative devolves into homily and explicit lessons, saying, for example, that everyone processes grief differently, a point repeated throughout the book. In mining her own suffering, though, she provides hope for other grieving parents. A brave, candid memoir that earnestly seeks to help readers who have also suffered loss.
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“By turns hilarious and heartfelt, this short novel provides an insider’s view of the angst and animosity hiding beneath the veneer of popular comedy.” from reruns
RERUNS
international spying that eventually extends to the southern tip of Africa. Comprised of short, rapid-fire chapters, this spirited spy tale quickly assembles a myriad of moving parts that, all working together, confidently build suspense and steadfastly propel the adventure forward. There are strange things afoot, and Donald is in the thick of it. Nefarious figures keep popping up on the periphery and vanishing, leaving only unanswered questions in their wakes. The quaintness of invisible ink and weirdly fashioned devices of unknown design smack of a time when the forces of good and evil appeared more clearly defined. The events here may be fanciful, but the secret code and the name it reveals serve as the story’s lynchpin securely rooted in reality. As such, Donald’s journey deep into the heart of a secret, nefarious organization pays homage to the tireless efforts of World War II codebreakers, superbly illustrating the ingenuity they employed to help shape the path of history. The serviceable prose—“Donald tried to taste some of the African beer and bravely swallowed some. It was a milky watery substance”— largely eschews overwrought descriptions in favor of plot propulsion, seldom distracting from the action. A refreshingly earnest adventure that honors the work of World War II–era codebreakers.
Hunter, David M. CreateSpace (176 pp.) $10.00 paper | Aug. 12, 2013 978-1-4827-3262-7 Spanning from one Emmy season to the next, Hunter’s slim black comedy follows the production cycle of a farcical take on television history from the perspectives of three key players. Erin Greer, the brilliant but bored and often neurotic comedienne and head of $our Dough Productions, is a perennial Emmy winner, but all the accolades can’t relieve her of an overwhelming aversion to trite sitcom tropes. Enter Zach Shelby, a once-celebrated sitcom writer now working alongside Madam Sun, proprietress of a laundry and dry cleaners. Shelby’s cynical view of the TV industry may be just what Greer needs to jump-start her next big project—a dark reprisal of the great ladies of sitcom (think older and embittered versions of Lucy, Jeannie and Samantha). But Shelby won’t have a chance of becoming part of the project if Greer’s obsessive assistant, Francesca Golden, has anything to say about it. Long accustomed to Greer’s abuses and idiosyncrasies, Francesca is determined to finally have the comedienne all to herself, but that doesn’t mean Francesca’s immune to Shelby’s unassuming sex appeal. One way or another, everybody ends up at Madam Sun’s, but far from providing clear guidance, the enigmatic laundress complicates the plot with some old secrets of her own. By turns hilarious and heartfelt, this short novel provides an insider’s view of the angst and animosity hiding beneath the veneer of popular comedy. Hunter’s short chapters call to mind the episodic nature of television programming, and as with many shows, some episodes are better than others. The early chapters suffer from a surfeit of exposition that eventually segues to a surprisingly complex, character-driven story arc. By the end, fortunes change for better or worse, and some of television’s greatest comedic legacies will never be the same. A dark, laugh-track-ready take on deceptively light fare.
STUCK IS NOT A FOUR-LETTER WORD
Johnson, Deborah iUniverse (270 pp.) $29.95 | $19.95 paper | $3.99 e-book Jul. 8, 2013 978-1-4759-9662-3 A personal self-help guide to becoming “unstuck” in business and in life. Johnson (Walking with the Hymns, 2013) uses examples from her own life, and from the lives of savvy business executives and others, to illustrate seven steps to help readers achieve their goals. Each step (for example, “reinvent yourself,” “eliminate distractions,” “play like you’re in the major leagues”) is explored in four or five chapters. Each chapter ends with a “Moving Forward” section, in which Johnson poses thought-provoking questions, calls for action or assigns homework to help readers determine the areas that may require improvement. Although all the steps are quite useful, the sixth section, “Do the Business,” is perhaps the strongest. Johnson asks close friend and successful real estate entrepreneur Jim Heitbrink for his best business advice— which can easily be applied to life in general: “Number one, find your uniqueness….Number two, watch the cash. Number three, work just a little harder than everyone else.” Later, Johnson tells a quick, intriguing story about carmaker Henry Ford that leads to a powerful lesson: “Know your value; then you can ask for what you’re worth”—a very useful concept, particularly in a down economy. Although the first three-quarters of the book unfold at a fairly languid pace, the last few chapters have a much faster tempo, which gives the ending a rushed, almost disconnected feel. However, despite this, Johnson still manages
DEATH WATCH BEETLE An Historical Post WWII Spy Thriller Huntley, David E. Huntley Associates (Dallas), Inc. (480 pp.) $16.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Apr. 22, 2013 978-1-4575-2373-1
An old-fashioned espionage yarn involving crafty coded messages, set against a post–World War II milieu buzzing with Soviet spies, fugitive Nazis and UFO sightings. When Everyman Donald accidently dribbles some errant apple juice on a slip of paper, revealing hidden cypher text, the resourceful Brit is unwittingly drawn into an intricate web of |
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THE TEEN MAGICIAN: THAT’S YOU! A Complete Guide to Booking and Performing Party Shows
to get important points across, including the powerful notion that we’re all making an impact—although we may never know the extent of it until much later; she came to that realization after she was asked to sing at a former student’s well-attended funeral. Observations such as these, along with the book’s many helpful tips and suggestions, may help readers to be more mindful of their life choices, think positively and live fuller lives. An engaging seven-step plan for tackling seemingly insurmountable problems.
Kraus, Charles Other Than Now (176 pp.) $16.95 paper | $9.99 e-book | Jan. 1, 2013 978-1-62309-774-5 The hard part of magic—getting paid for it—is ably demystified in this straightforward debut primer. Kraus, a renowned magician who has been performing in paid shows since the age of 12, reveals the secrets behind a few nifty tricks and steers readers toward books, magazines, magic shops and clubs that will teach them the nuts and bolts of the magician’s craft, but his focus is on helping neophyte magicians turn their passion into moneymaking gigs at children’s birthday parties. He emphasizes showmanship as the key to a successful party business: flamboyant costumes (sequins will spruce up the classic top hat and tails); a commanding stage presence (Kraus recommends the performer listen to recordings of his or her voice and practice modulating it); and jokey patter (he includes an extended script for his own “mystery trick” bit that rivets the attention of restive youngsters). Thematic storytelling, running gags and catchphrases help, too, as a way of drawing kids into the unfolding magical effects. Kraus analyzes the niceties of tailoring a show to the audience’s age and attention span—very young kids may not get jokes or register the magician’s apparent defiance of physics and logic—and offers strategies on how to cope with the young volunteer who suddenly dissolves in tears, the disruptive brat who needs to be disciplined or the heedlessly talkative parents who need to be diplomatically shushed. Due attention is paid to the all-important topic of advertising and promotions (sending self-written public relations profiles to local news outlets desperate for filler is a surefire trick), and there’s a thorough discussion of contracting and recordkeeping, complete with sample forms. Kraus writes in a clear, humorous style, sprinkling in his own entertaining anecdotes of stage fright, a prop that sliced open his thumb and a flash paper (highly flammable paper) incident that almost burned down the house. Magicians in the making will learn a lot from his vast experience and engaging presentation. A reassuring guide to turning a magical hobby into a profitable business.
SCARED HITLESS
Jones, Carolyn Anderson CreateSpace (260 pp.) $9.95 paper | $0.99 e-book | Feb. 4, 2013 978-1-4819-4884-5 Three ladies of a certain age stumble into adventure and romance in the first of a planned series featuring the Lemon Drop Martini Club. Fun-loving retiree Constance Canary Woods’ life is thrown into chaos when one of her best friends, Catherine, a columnist for a Denver newspaper, writes an exposé about a local Mafia family’s drug ties and becomes the target of a mob hit. Constance, Catherine and their third pal, Cynthia—the leading ladies of the Lemon Drop Martini Club—hope to elude the killer by laying low at a secluded lake house. Once settled in their luxurious hideaway, the women become entangled in a series of misadventures, as dimwitted, accident-prone mobster Donatello “Dusty” Galucci stalks them around picturesque Grand Lake Village. Along the way, gruff private investigator Mick Carelli connects with the crew and becomes Constance’s love interest, although their budding romance is almost derailed by a vengeful ghost that attaches itself to Constance in a misplaced supernatural subplot. In spite of some of the more dubious plot twists, the members of the Lemon Drop Martini Club aren’t bad company; they’re game for anything and greet every new challenge with a stiff drink and their signature toast, “Here’s to your liver, lover!” It would certainly be wiser, given the imminent threat, for the ladies to maintain a low profile instead of constantly hitting the town and to keep their faculties intact by downing fewer martinis—but that kind of hardnosed practicality would rob the novel of its good-natured joie de vivre. Dusty is so inept that he barely registers as a threat, allowing the focus to remain squarely on the group’s good times and romantic intrigues. Jones (Cowgirl Up!, 2012) seems less interested in creating tension than in demonstrating that the baby boomer set can still throw down, and by that measure, she admirably succeeds. A high-spirited, if somewhat silly, thriller that highlights the enduring joys of female friendships.
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“Overall, Musto emerges as a resilient survivor, weathering the obliteration of his camp by city workers with a soft curse and plucky aplomb.” from the life and times of richard musto
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD MUSTO
he still desires his human love, Elena, and dreams of marrying her—even though it seems that they couldn’t possibly be together. As he pursues her, he also encounters the story’s villain, Count Victor Du Fay, a practitioner of the dark arts who is driven by his ambition and greed. Fate, and the conventions of the genre, require that Nicholas and Du Fay battle each other for Elena’s love—and for power. The novel’s suspense comes as a result of this battle between good and evil, as readers wonder which will win out: Will Nicholas manage to defeat Du Fay and be united with Elena, or will Du Fay destroy his hopes and ruin any possibility of love? The vampire genre appears to be boundless in its appeal; Machat’s entry may satisfy avid genre fans, with its briskly paced story and direct, engaging style. Its diary-entry format is reminiscent of the earliest vampire novels (such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula). The novel may especially please readers familiar with the classic horror from such practitioners as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Although the plot—a vampire, in love with a human, battles an archnemesis—is fairly standard fare, and the setting recalls 19th-century Gothic romance more than modern horror, fans looking for a familiar tale with appropriate chills may find much to satisfy them in this thriller. A fast-moving, romantic vampire story that convincingly harks back to Gothic conventions.
Lamport, Joe Roll Your Own Press (186 pp.) Nov. 15, 2013
A winsome character sketch that celebrates a homeless man’s quirky personality and picaresque life story. Richard Musto, an 87-year-old homeless man living on Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, is a Runyonesque figure who has a jumble of colorful memories and habits. He’s a fastidious housekeeper, carefully keeping his milk-crate–and-cardboard campsite shipshape and his patch of sidewalk clean and mopped; a dapper dresser in black beret and American-flag cravat; an amateur expert on military history and cinema, always happy to act out a scene; a cigar-smoking bon vivant and incorrigible ladies’ man, always ready with witticisms for the Hooters gals; and a clear thinker with an acerbic take on the world (sample pensée: “A lot of guys / stop to ask me / what’s the secret of life / and I’ll say to them / how the hell should I know”). Lamport, bemused by Musto, spent many an evening hanging out and recording the man’s back story, which included combat in World War II, many knockabout jobs, an enduring passion for the ponies, a sexless marriage and countless adventures in cross-dressing and BDSM, which, he claims, began with the nuns at his grammar school. (One of Musto’s more improbable sideline career jags was as a ladies’ maid and lingerie model.) The author tells Musto’s tale in limpid, engaging free verse, which suits the narrative’s offbeat content and poetic mood; along the way, he sprinkles in atmospheric odes to the bustling New York streetscape, along with somewhat overdone stanzas invoking the muse. The portrait also has some dark edges, including an ugly family feud that makes Musto “all the more human in his monstrosity.” Musto appears in Michel Delsol’s arresting black-and-white photographs looking like an elfin version of an Easter Island statue. Overall, Musto emerges as a resilient survivor, weathering the obliteration of his camp by city workers with a soft curse and plucky aplomb. The result is a heartening lesson on “How to live life in extremis / Yet to the fullest.” A romanticized but beguiling saga of one man’s life on the streets.
GRECIAN VISTAS Giacomo Leopardi and Romantic Hellas Pesaresi, Massimo Mandolini CreateSpace (144 pp.) $9.99 paper | $5.99 e-book Sep. 28, 2012 978-1-4781-5661-1
An erudite examination of ancient Greek influences on the verses of 19thcentury Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Pesaresi, with his degrees in classics, philosophy and Italian literature, is well-prepared to plumb the depths of Leopardi’s works. This short study, replete with extensive footnotes and references, isn’t meant for lay readers, nor does it serve as an effective beginner’s introduction to Leopardi. Instead, the author presents a highly academic exploration of Leopardi’s use of Hellenic motifs, as well as contemporary criticisms and reactions to the poet’s work. Leopardi, the author asserts, “is the most Grecian of the Italian poets.” In an extensive introduction, he discusses the poet’s pessimism, comparing him to philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, among others. He then examines the Greek poet Sappho’s influence on Leopardi’s poetry, particularly discussing his 1823 poem “Sappho’s Last Song.” In Sappho, Pesaresi believes, Leopardi discovered a female persona with whom he could relate and through whom he could communicate; in real life, his relations with women (particularly his mother) were often tortuous. The second chapter looks at the poet’s use of mythology, building upon an analysis of the 1822 poem “To Spring, or, Concerning the Ancient Myths.” This chapter addresses the tension between the poet’s antipathies toward religion and the influence of Greek
A WALK IN THE SUN Machat, Lisa Dominique Manuscript (228 pp.)
A debut vampire novel, set in 19th-century Europe, full of romance and revenge. Nicholas Justine was born into money but neglected by his family. At age 17, he’s attacked by a vampire and, as a result, turned into one himself. As he struggles to comprehend and deal with his new fate as an immortal, supernatural being, |
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RESUCITÓ
mythology upon his work. In a third chapter, the author focuses on Leopardi’s 1823 poem “To His Lady” and asserts that the poet was influenced by the Greek philosopher Plato. Overall, Pesaresi makes a case that the pessimistic Leopardi looked back upon Hellenic culture, and the beauty it represented, with a certain longing: “For some secret necessity, Leopardi, who intended to celebrate the nullity of life and nature, ends up mourning their passing splendor.” A dense but well-researched work of analysis targeted at experts in literary criticism.
Ross, Christopher CreateSpace (238 pp.) $16.00 paper | Jul. 12, 2013 978-1-4776-9963-8 An engrossing, eccentric, inventive, poetic reimagining of the Revolutionary era in the United States. There’s no shortage of histories of the American Revolution. Readers looking for strong books on the founding of the nation might turn to Jack Levin’s The Crossing or Nathaniel Philbrick’s Bunker Hill. Ross’ debut takes place during this same time period—the fall of 1776 to the spring of 1777. But his hymn to America’s founding is unlike those of Levin and Philbrick; as Michael Kerouac writes in the foreword, Ross’ work is “not the History of America, but the experience of its rising.” And his collection is less a retelling than a revival; resucitó means “resuscitate” or “resurrect.” The author’s hope, it seems, is to bring the past into the present and to make old stories new, and his effort results in a delightful, unexpected success. He peppers his text with anachronisms, filling his “historical” narrative with artifacts from later times. For instance, Warshington—who is and is not quite our first president—plans the attack on Trenton while alluding to Charles Dickens’ Scrooge, who would not appear in print for roughly another 6 decades. And later, we learn that Warshington digs his 1 percent Greek yogurt; simply put, our fearless leader loves Fage. With these and other nods to later history—not all of it American—Ross reels his protagonist forward through the years, hoping to dock him on modern shores. In another attempt at enlivening his tale, Ross tells most of it not in prose but in poetry, frequently falling back on a light but precise free verse. For example, he opens his little epic trying to hook us with piscatorial imagery: “Warshington was faced with a fish decision—do he, should he, / would he want cod, carp, trout, bass, perch, walleye, lunker, / or shrout?” There’s a bit of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock here but more that seems genuinely new. A truly original look at America’s past—and present.
THE THINKING ODYSSEY Preston, Donald CreateSpace (222 pp.) $12.00 paper | $7.00 e-book Feb. 26, 2013 978-1-4812-5413-7
A wide-ranging discussion of the natural world from a dedicated but inquisitive theist. The habits of the giant coconut crab, the workings of world religions, and the ebb and flow of the weather might seem about as disparate a group of assembled elements as possible. But seen through the author’s lens of interconnected ecosystems, the preceding topics and many more become a unified field of sound scholarly exploration, not to mention free-flowing musing. Dutifully recounting the science behind such notions before asking the inevitable question of why we believe in the things we believe in, the author confidently credits a supreme being presiding over the whole shebang. But the God born out of this reality’s Big Bang is not the meddling—some might say malevolent—deity of the Old Testament. According to the author, he can’t be, since “God’s interventions would change natural ecology and play havoc with the Butterfly Effect.” The last phenomena, as sci-fi fans know, postulates that even the flapping of a butterfly’s wings—or the absence of such flapping—has enormous consequences further down the chain of interconnected causality. Thus, the God described here is omnipresent and omnipotent, but he doesn’t intervene or answer prayers: “God does not tinker with anything on Earth.” This view, the author says, leaves the door wide open for science and theism to happily coexist. For instance, evolution isn’t a problem for the theistic writer if Charles Darwin’s theory just happens to be the Almighty’s way of getting things done. Ultimately, however, the lack of a coherent or compelling focus threatens to undermine the earnestness that resides within this constantly leapfrogging treatise. Those operating outside the restrictive lens of religious dogma won’t be inspired or especially challenged, but seen through a more accommodating lens, this God-fearing author’s exhortations could prove notably provocative and productive. A well-crafted reflection on the place of religion in the physical world.
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KEEP FOREVER Gulag Memoirs
Sokolenko, Aleksandr Konstantinovich Translated by Lane, Alex CreateSpace (156 pp.) $10.99 paper | $2.99 e-book Dec. 14, 2012 978-1-4752-4689-6 A former prisoner recounts his years in the Soviet gulag in this memoir. In this English translation of reminiscences originally recorded in 1970, Sokolenko shares stories from his years of imprisonment for political offenses during the Stalin regime. (A biographical note explains that Sokolenko was exonerated in 1956, when it was concluded that there was no |
basis for his original conviction.) The narrative does not follow Sokolenko’s imprisonment chronologically but is made up of a series of vignettes, with Sokolenko blending his own experiences into the stories of his fellow prisoners and their guards. These true stories capture both the horrific experience and bitter humor of Russia under Stalin, as committed socialists, blackmarket businessmen and ordinary people struggled with the changing definition of “enemy of the state.” Sokolenko’s narrative clearly demonstrates that the corruption and absurdity of the Soviet system confronted prisoners inside the gulag as well as outside—Sokolenko was often forbidden to use his agricultural experience, even though the camp was expected to grow its own food; medicinal stores of vodka were used for a prison guards’ party; a corrupt and incompetent gulag administrator was finally removed from his position, only to be reinstated because it was a crime for anyone to challenge his commitment to the socialist cause. Throughout the book, the tone is matterof-fact, allowing the events described, rather than any elegant prose, to work on readers’ emotions. This was a wise decision by the author, who does not overwhelm the prisoners’ anecdotes with unnecessary commentary. (In contrast, the book’s footnotes, which decipher for the contemporary reader many of the names and policies Sokolenko mentions, are a useful addition, and the text could easily have accommodated more.) The result is a clear, bracing depiction, but not a maudlin one, of one of the darker chapters of modern history. Skillfully portrays the bleakness of the prison system with an appreciation for the dark humor that allowed the author to survive it.
speaks to him; and his other son, Jackson, struggles through a complicated divorce that threatens Jack’s relationship with his 11-year-old granddaughter, Sadie Mae, the one person he believes can redeem his family’s future—that is, if she’ll ever get off her smartphone. Jack’s misfortunes intensify, calcifying into a surprisingly enthralling, if at times overwhelming, account of one unlucky guy. So much happens to poor Jack in the first 60 pages that it’s sometimes difficult to juggle all the subplots––or identify the primary storyline––which raises questions about an older man’s ability to handle it all. In a few days’ time, Jack aids a snakebitten Mexican woman, tends to a dying Asian immigrant, helps rescue cowboys from drug-smuggling kidnappers and, the following morning, spends half a day fighting a brush fire with blankets, just before discovering the town sheriff ’s charred corpse. But such a complaint is nearly inconsequential in light of the constant thrills that keep the pages turning. And that’s saying nothing of Stalcup’s deep-seated empathy, convincing dialogue and metered prose that evoke the work of Kent Haruf and Pete Dexter. An ambitious, sincere novel that weighs the meaning of family and success.
FIRST DO NO HARM A Benjamin Davis Novel Turk, A. Self (375 pp.) $14.95 paper | $4.99 e-book Sep. 20, 2013 978-0-9892663-0-7
WANDERING WEST
In this novel, based in part on the author’s legal experiences, a lawyer goes after two crooked doctors who have been performing unnecessary surgeries at a small-town hospital in Tennessee. Doctors English and Herman have a good scam going. Herman informs patients that they need to have their gall bladders removed, then refers the patients to English, who performs the surgeries. Both doctors get paid handsomely, and the patients never realize there wasn’t anything wrong with their gall bladders in the first place. Things are going well until Dr. Patel, an osteopath at the hospital, wonders why a patient of English and Herman’s isn’t being sent to a bigger hospital, even though the patient’s rapidly deteriorating condition clearly suggests she should. Herman’s refusal to move her causes Patel to suspect he’s covering up something, but when Patel raises an objection with hospital administration, she quickly finds herself out of a job. When she talks to a lawyer, other cases come to light and eventually find their way to Benjamin Davis, an aggressive former Brooklynite now practicing law in Nashville. But English and Herman have assembled an impressive legal team of their own; someone on the defense side has even hired thugs to intimidate Davis, so he and his team face considerable effort—and danger—as they work tirelessly in their pursuit of justice. Written in crisp, clear prose, Turk’s debut novel is rich with legal detail. Sometimes, those details are a bit too rich, as
Stalcup, Gary C. Lulu (316 pp.) $19.99 paper | Aug. 26, 2013 978-1-4834-0327-4 In Stalcup’s debut novel, an aging, disgraced New York trader starts over as a ranch owner in rural Texas. Once a successful Wall Street investor, Jack Stiler suspiciously lost his job while tending to his dying wife as she battled cancer. After her death, Jack had little choice but to return to the Lucky Star–– the family ranch he inherited from his parents––located south of San Antonio, near the Mexican border. Though at first reluctant about the dramatic change, 64-year-old Jack has settled into a new identity as a kindhearted employer and local luminary who uses his investing skills to help fund the ranch amid a landmark drought. But the recent dry spell is perhaps the least of Jack’s concerns. A local pipeline company offers him one underhanded deal after another to buy part of his land, and the property is a gateway for violent drug smugglers in search of an easier life in America. Making matters worse, Jack grows increasingly lonely as he watches his family fall apart. One of his sons is comatose after a violent rampage and suicide attempt; his daughter, of whose lesbian lifestyle he disapproves, rarely |
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“[T]his story achingly portrays a family severed by divorce and encourages the healing of hearts.” from signal grace
FALL AWAKE
the courtroom scenes seem to include every motion, question, instruction to the jury, etc. While fascinating from a legal perspective, these details cause pacing issues and, at times, drag the narrative to a crawl. The subplot involving the thugs who terrorize Davis and his team feels tacked on, and it never properly resolves. However, the quality of the writing coupled with the insider’s view of the cases—Turk is a retired attorney, and the novel is based on actual cases from his career—mostly make up for these shortfalls. Sometimes slow but always well-written and full of detail.
Yumas, M. R. Amazon Digital Services (361 pp.) $3.99 e-book | Nov. 28, 2013 The first installment in a YA sci-fi series about an unusual 12-year-old whose mental acuity far surpasses her peers’. Young Josie and her mom have just moved to Huntsville, Ala., and it’s not the first time the pair has moved suddenly. Josie starts attending a private high school, and it’s an experience that makes her scared and nervous. Up to this point, she had a childhood of rigorous home schooling, and, aside from her mother, her only companion has been an imaginary older sister, Katelyn, whom she visits in her dreams. (Josie’s father disappeared when she was a baby.) As she begins to make friends at school and in her neighborhood, she begins to see less and less of Katelyn; at the same time, she starts to notice mysterious black cars following her around. She eventually figures out that her father’s disappearance, her dreams of Katelyn and the mystery of the cars are all connected—and that everything can be traced back to a secret from long ago. The novel starts off slowly, introducing Josie and her back story, but things pick up speed—and tension begins to mount—as she uncovers new revelations about herself and her mother. Although some readers may find the novel a bit overlong, it remains tightly plotted throughout; the author effectively drops hints early on that pay off later and portrays the major and supporting characters in a multilayered, believable way. As this is the first book of a planned series, the cliffhanger ending may leave some readers feeling frustrated, but most will be eager to find out Josie’s fate in the sequel. A gritty, original sci-fi thriller that will likely appeal to both teen and adult readers.
SIGNAL GRACE
Yates, T. M. Self (216 pp.) $11.95 paper | $5.99 e-book | Jun. 1, 2013 978-0-9892232-0-1 A daughter remembers her father as memory combines with love and forgiveness to create a touching debut memoir. Yates, now in her early 30s, tells it like it is. Her family split by divorce—which happened when she was 3—and geography, she grew up yearning for connection. She and her father “never managed to be close, as fathers and daughters are supposed to be,” she recalls. “We didn’t giggle together or share little jokes, we didn’t really even see each other that often.” Her parents separately lived in various U.S. cities, and her father’s Army career meant international postings as well. Yates lived with her mother and younger brother, and she called her dad Michael: “When he was gone, I couldn’t think of him as ‘dad’ because it hurt too much to miss him.” Her yearned-for connection intensified when she lived with her father during her senior year at Incarnate Word High School in San Antonio, Texas. After her own brief marriage, while still a student Texas A&M, violently blew up, her father helped her file legal protection orders, but she still felt alone: “I had, quite simply, no idea what constituted a good man.” Despite the chaos—which Yates describes in graceful, readable prose— she began noticing hopeful signs. “There is a name. Catholics call it a ‘signal grace.’ It’s a sign that God’s listening to you and directing you all the time. You see these moments by the grace of God. It indicates that you’re on the right path and that God is helping and guiding you.” Her sign is a shamrock, and after Michael’s death in 2010, unexpected shamrock-sightings comforted her: “I was flooded, over and through, by gratitude and forgiveness; they rinsed away the grime of mistakes and judgment like a baptism, and made me feel radiant in flowing peace.” Cynics might be quick to lump this life story in with the recent glut of early age memoirs, but better than most, this story achingly portrays a family severed by divorce and encourages the healing of hearts. Yates keeps a strict focus on the father-daughter dynamic, and the “signal grace” idea is only brought toward the end, so it shouldn’t deter casual, irreligious readers. A well-crafted, compelling account of how one confused little girl grew up and learned to live with her past by seeing signs of God’s grace. 150
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This Issue’s Contributors # Alana Abbott • Charles Cassady • Stephanie Cerra • Megan Elliott • Renee Fountain Jonathan Fullmer • Alissa Grosso • Sean Hammer • Justin Hickey • Laura B. Kennelly Jennifer Latson • Peter Lewis • Meghan Lewit • Dan Lopez • Joe Maniscalco • Dale McGarrigle Chris Messick • Margueya Novick • Joshua T. Pederson • William E. Pike • Jon C. Pope Jackson Radish • Sarah Rettger • Jessica Skwire Routhier • Mark A. Salfi • Benjamin Samuel Sarah Smith • Matthew Ulland
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THE BARREL MURDER Zarocostas, Michael CreateSpace (336 pp.) $11.99 paper | $3.99 e-book Nov. 7, 2013 978-1-4927-7625-3
An Italian detective fights the Mafia and police corruption in turn-of-thecentury New York City, in this genre thriller based on true events. Joe Petrosino is the first Italian-American detective on the New York City police force. His ethnicity, combined with his Republican leanings (he’s a friend of former Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt), makes him an outsider in a department where Irish cops and Tammany Hall still hold many of the reins of power. But when a mutilated body turns up in a barrel on the Lower East Side, Joe’s background becomes a valuable asset. All signs point to a Mafia killing, though few cops have ever heard of this shadowy Sicilian gang. As Petrosino and his partner, Max Schmittberger, investigate the crime, it becomes clear that this is far more than a gangland revenge killing and that some of the most powerful political players in New York City may be implicated both in murder and in a far deeper scandal. Zarocostas (Plummet, 2012) ably depicts the teeming landscape of early-20th-century New York in his well-researched, fast-paced and occasionally gruesome book. Zingy dialogue brings the story to life, while evocative details transport readers to the city’s noisy, pungent, crowded and often dangerous immigrant neighborhoods. History buffs will get a kick out of the reproductions of newspaper clippings and photographs related to the actual case that are sprinkled throughout. Several well-known historical figures also make appearances: Petrosino crosses paths with muckrakers Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, and a sticky-fingered ragamuffin named Irving Berlin plays a small role. Those details help establish the historical time period, transforming the novel into more than a simple police procedural. This is both a murder mystery and a story about the many forces shaping a dynamic American city at a critical point in its development. But Petrosino’s efforts to uncover the truth about the barrel murder are equally fascinating. A few too many threads occasionally overcomplicate the story (Adelina, Petrosino’s love interest, adds little, and a twist involving one character’s sexuality is gratuitous), but overall, this is a well-crafted page-turner. A fine mystery likely to appeal equally to crime enthusiasts and fans of historical fiction.
K i rk us M e di a L L C # President M A RC W I N K E L M A N Chief Operating Officer M E G L A B O R D E KU E H N Chief Financial Officer J ames H ull SVP, Marketing M ike H ejny SVP, Online Paul H offman # Copyright 2013 by Kirkus Media LLC. KIRKUS REVIEWS (ISSN 1948- 7428) is published semimonthly by Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Road, Austin, TX 78744. Subscription prices are: Digital & Print Subscription (U.S.) - 12 Months ($199.00) Digital & Print Subscription (International) - 12 Months ($229.00) Digital Only Subscription - 12 Months ($169.00) Single copy: $25.00. All other rates on request. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Kirkus Reviews, PO Box 3601, Northbrook, IL 60065-3601. Periodicals Postage Paid at Austin, TX 78710 and at additional mailing offices.
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ThE
HoLiDaYs ArE CoMiNg
( AnD So ArE ThE
ZoMbIeS )
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Keep your
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@LBSchool • LittleBrownLibrary.com